


Repentance

by snow_and_dirty_rain



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Repentance, Stockholm Syndrome, snow_and_dirty_rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 07:46:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 55,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3969772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snow_and_dirty_rain/pseuds/snow_and_dirty_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan Casey ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time on her undergrad work experience sorting files at Mount Massive Asylum and sees how the Morphogenic Engine derails Eddie Gluskin. She breaks into the mental hospital with the intent of 'saving' the Variants and exposing Blaire, but realises she's got more than she bargained for.</p><p>(TW for mentions of past sexual abuse.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The flagstone floors with their cracked tiles of chess board black and white. The upturned wheelchair with the dented wheel spinning slowly, turning on its glinting fulcrum like a merry go round, with the cold fluorescent light spilling over it. This is a bad idea, one of my shittiest ideas actually, but I scarcely need to say that. I stand very still in the cone of warm, phosphorent light from the swinging lamp in the elevator shaft, my finger still poised on the button that brought me up here. They're the old sort, a mesh of rusted iron. I curl my hands around the metal and realise my palms are sweating and my hands are shaking. I take a deep breath in and remember what my therapist always said; feel the ground beneath you, be in the present. My feet are an anchor. But I don't think I want to feel that I'm the present, staring down the corridor like the barrel of a gun. There's a door at the end, next to the wheelchair. Between me and this door, there is blood on the walls.  
I force myself to wrench the lift door aside, and so it begins, I think to myself, staggering out into the open, pacing fast along the corridor. The lights flicker, and each time the darkness descends, I see in my imagination eyes glinting in the dark, the flash of white teeth. The laughter of the insane, the pattering footsteps of some fevered mind, someone who has caught the smell of me. Fear crawls along my spine and I walk quicker, breathing hard through my nose, and I'm getting there – I am. I might actually do this. The wheelchair is nearing and so is the door. I reach it and seize the doorknob in a spasm of relief, my panic finally washing over me in a torrent as I open the door and slip inside like a little sliver of shadow.  
The room inside is black and smells of damp. I press myself to the wall, feeling like a child. My blood is thundering in my ears and I can feel how my eyes are straining in the dark, blinking to adjust myself, both wanting to see and not wanting to see. After several seconds of panting, of feeling my fingertips quiver against the peeling paint of the wall, I can see I've entered some kind of science lab. Grey on grey are the soft shapes of long tables, taps that look like the long necks of swans bent over small basins, and the gas nozzles that I used to light bunsen burners in school. I feel some comfort in this, some familiarity, but catch the scent of smoke on the air. A phrase flits through my head; where there is smoke, there is -  
I don't finish the thought. Something in the room clatters to the ground and the sound of smashing glass makes me jolt. I bite my lip to silence my heavy breathing and shimmy along the wall, trying to move away from the noise. My eyes search for somewhere to conceal myself, some cabinet or cupboard. I catch sight of a storage compartment, perhaps for keeping science equipment, and deftly move towards it, not pausing to look at the cause of the noise. I don't need to know. I don't want to know. I open the cabinet door with a creak that makes my heart clamour – please don't make noise – before ducking inside, shutting it behind me, to my luck finding it completely empty. My fingers scrabble on the inside of the little doors for some kind of handle for me to hold, and I find a small catch. I cling to it and pull the doors as far shut as I can. Keep them shut. I'll make sure nothing comes inside. Then the realisation of what happened, the sudden noise that could only have been caused by a person, dawns upon me and I think I'm going to vomit.  
A grumble outside in the dark. I feel my throat clot with a dying scream.  
“Darling?” I swear that the word, its drawn-out vowels, linger in the air like the unshakeable feeling after a nightmare. That moment after waking where the demon from your dream could be real, could be hunched right there in the corner of your room. The moment where reality is a blurred figure. “Darling, I know you're there. I can smell you. Did you think I'd forget about you? Oh no. No, no. These games are becoming tiresome. I'd like for you to come out now.”  
And the voice rings within my own ears, because I recognise it, and my heart drops with a sickening feeling like when your stomach flips on a fairground ride. I've walked these flagstone floors, and I've and come upon what I sought.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie arrives.

\- Six Months Earlier –

Apparently university graduates are useless without work placement, no matter how crummy it happens to be. I sit in the passenger seat with files clutched under my arm, detailing my extra-curricular activities and the grades I had worked so hard for in college. I was a first-year student ambassador, led small debate clubs, belonged to the feminist and drama societies, and things like that. I reason I should be fine. Come on, I tell myself, this is just filing. A simple, menial job. But as I look up at the towering silhouette of this imposing building, craning my neck to see through the front window, I reconsider.  
“I'm going to shit myself.” I grumble. My trusted driver rolls her eyes as she parks us between two large white transit vans, emblazoned with company logos, probably belonging to cleaners and doctors.  
“Better not, this interior is new.” She snorts, drumming her fingers on the wheel as she kills the engine. “It's going to be fine, alright?” She lights a cigarette and doesn't bother to offer me one, knowing that no amount of cajoling is going to get me to smoke. She rolls down the window and lights up. “Most of the people there will be too busy dealing with crazies to even notice you, and the patients themselves – well, they're otherwise occupied with the voices in their heads, right?”  
“Don't think it's really politically correct to call them 'crazies', Jess.”  
“Bah, to hell with political correctness.” She purses her lips on the cigarette and fixes me with her stolid brown eyes, her arched brows. “Now get out of my car and go attack this.” She slaps my rump hard as I shakily get up, exiting the car.  
“Pleasure, as always.” I close the car door. She makes an obscene gesture, before leering out the window and adding, “You're welcome for the lift, by the way. Pay me back with some drinks this weekend, yeah?”  
“Uh huh.” I nod, trailing past the parking lot, grimacing as I glance up at those ominous windows again. It looks all black inside, dark even though its nine in the morning. This is like the beginning of a cheaply-shot horror movie on the Syfy channel, only the casting crew would have picked a busty blonde for the female lead. Not someone with self-bleached hair and messy eyeliner wearing the only pair of “formal” shoes she owns. I catch the glimpse of my gaunt, pale face with the waifish green eyes in a ground floor window and scoff at the snarled mess of dyed red hair, turning away. Jesus, they'll probably reject me at the door. I can see it now; “Oh, she looks like an art student. Probably forgets to shower in the mornings and can't do long division. I don't think we can have that.” Not that any of those things are wrong. In fact, I'd probably compliment them on their insight, but that's beside the point.  
I amble along the path leading to the main entrance, noting the tangles of pale, anaemic-looking thistles and brambles in the unkempt window-boxes, shuddering in the cool wind. I wrap my jacket around myself and sidle in through the automatic doors, confronted almost immediately by a fug of warm air conditioning and two set-faced men.  
“Good morning, do you have an appointment?” The man to the right of me asks, and I nearly fall off my feet right there. I bite my tongue not to ask him if he routinely scares unpaid interns half to death.  
“I – yeah, I'm here for an internship. I'm Joan Casey.” I extend my hand as if he wants to shake it, and his beady dark eyes flash down to my gesture, my white crooked white fingers. He grimaces and shakes hands with me, and I chew the inside of my lip and inwardly die.  
“Nice to meet you, Miss Casey.” He says, and he and his colleague direct me to the front desk, which is literally several metres in front of me. “You can sign in here.”  
“Thanks.”  
I steal fervid glances around the entrance hall as I scribble down my name, the nurse at the front desk eyeing me in her pallid shirt and trousers. The place is lit by unforgiving, cool lights mounted into the ceiling, although the building shows traces of a hidden age that is evidenced by a crooked, dust-filmed Tiffany lamp on a far table. Most of the furniture is mahogany, nicked here and there with little cuts but otherwise scrupulously polished. There's a cleaner swiping the hard wood floors and dusting the rugs in the corner of the hall, humming quietly under his breath. The place smells like soup. I expected something different, something more austere, but I've never visited a mental hospital. It is neither warm and welcoming as I dreamt of these places to be, nor is it the decrepit haunting Jess has been taunting me about for weeks. I'm going to get her back for all the hours of sleep she's made me lose.  
“Where shall I go?” I ask after several moments of the nurse and I looking about the room.  
“Are you one of Murkoff's interns?” She asks, smiling in an asinine way that makes me unsettled.  
I nod. I'm not entirely sure who Murkoff is, but the word 'intern' reassures me. “Then you'll need to come through here, to the labs. I'll show you.”  
And she leads me through a dining hall that reminds me of a school cafeteria, my papers clutched to my chest, my knuckles deathly-white. I realise I've been gritting my teeth this whole time, but I can't stop my eyes from darting about the pale blue room with its long tables. Several patients sit and eat, accompanied by nurses, some in wheelchairs, most with sallow skin and eyes rimmed with dark circles. I realise the nurse in front of me has been speaking and I've been blocking out every word.  
“Sorry, what?” I blurt.  
“I was saying how impressed the professors here were with your resume – they don't usually take students for internships, preferring graduates, but it looks like they were willing to make an exception.”  
“That's nice of them.” I reply, but the compliment doesn't stir my ego as it normally would. Instead I remain silent as I'm led past the hall, through narrow corridors of patient bedrooms, towards what appears to be the back of the building. It may just be my imagination, but the lights seem dimmer, and there're blinds drawn in the halls that throw blades of light over the wall, over my own hands. I thought I saw a man watching me through the narrow window in one of the bedroom doors, sat on the edge of a bed but with his face turned toward me. His eyes were owlish. I hasten a little.  
“Here we are.” She uses a company card to let me past two sets of double doors, and the walls back here are bare concrete. She turns on her heel and leaves, hurrying away, and I'm left to watch figures moving in semi-darkness behind a pair of metal doors with circular little windows. Two men stand sentinel, silent, either side of these doors, wielding weapons. I choke back questions as I walk towards them, then stop. Each holds a thick-muzzled black assault rifle, painted matt, their gloves fingers resting on the triggers.  
“Can I go in?”  
No reply. I nearly laugh out loud at the absurdity of the situation, trying to compensate for the panic building in the pit of my stomach. I open my mouth to ask once more, then dismiss the idea – I'm here for work, of course I can go in there. I step past them nervously, pushing aside the doors, finding myself standing within a hubbub of mechanical noise and voices. And beyond the computers and the TV monitors, at the very far end of the laboratory, behind a wall of thick glass, is the contorted figure of a man suspended in mid-air.

 

I often look back and tell myself that as soon as I walked in, I knew I should have turned back. The smell of soup was gone. The smiling nurse was gone, and behind me stood men as fierce as muscle-wrought dogs. It was like a gate had swung and locked behind me that would remain forever closed. If I had known in that moment what would happen, I would have turned around and fought my way out, past the arms of the guards, along the corridors, but I can't undo any of it. Like anyone ignorant, naïve, young and keen to please, I stood and smiled when the scientists came to speak to me. I judged the casual, complicit behaviour of the men and women in the laboratory as an assertion that this was okay, that there was surely some good reason for the man behind to glass to be wired to a machine.  
I sit at my computer and ignore the elephant in the room. I file case studies on patient behaviour and try to bite back nausea, try to quench my curiosity – 'Jason Hempel, three counts of murder, evidence of psychopathic tendencies. Admitted two years ago. Condition: fluctuating.' Then a more detailed description underscoring the patient's name, a small picture of his face printed in blurred black and white. Jason Hempel has a strong jaw and thick black hair, his head cocked back and his lips parted, eyes rheumy-looking as if he's dreaming. A chill races down my spine.  
'Hempel continues to display antagonistic behaviour towards therapists. He has been admitted to five different mental institutions barring Mt. Massive, and there is no notable progress made. Hempel has now been willingly referred to Murkoff experiments so “he can contribute to society.”'  
I become aware of a presence lingering behind me, and turn to see a woman standing at my shoulder.  
“You having fun snooping?” She asks, her narrow face stiff. I gawk up at her, then laugh, though my stomach twists in discomfort.  
“Sorry. I find psychology interesting – call it morbid curiosity.”  
“You're not being paid to indulge in reading files.”  
“You're right.” I say. “I'm not being paid at all.” This makes the expression on the woman's face even more sour, and if she hadn't just stared obliquely down her nose at me, I might not have said it. But she did. She stared at me with the unblinking eyes of a reptile.  
“Excuse me.” She replies, her coffee in hand, moving away to another desk and engaging in conversation with two younger computer technicians that introduced themselves to me earlier – Mark and Himmel. I turn back to my small work area and exhale, letting my shoulders drop. I pack up the file and continue to organise them alphabetically, typing in the files I've checked by entering their sort codes into the computer.  
Over the course of several hours, the large boxes around me begin to fill with my work. I've been gnashing my teeth and busting a gut doing as much as I can over the course of the morning just to piss this woman off by my tenacity, when people begin to disperse to lunch. No one has told me when my break is. I glance around and see them all, smiling, talking, going into the staff rooms or out to buy themselves food, until I'm nearly alone on the laboratory floor. I'm too sickened by the Hempel file to feel hungry, so instead take advantage of being alone. Slide my stupid shoes off under the desk and plant my cheek in my hand, staring at the white hum of the computer screen. Can I find Pac Man on here? Solitaire? Better not. Don't want to get fired. I'll admit it now, though my commitment to education is unwavering, my enthusiasm towards the world of work couldn't be any less so, hence why I'm having my first work experience at the age of eighteen. I'm pondering what other comebacks I could deliver to reptile-face if necessary when something in the corner of my eye makes me raise my head. I see that disconcerting scene beyond the glass again, the man suspended in some kind of greenish fluid, his body arching back on itself like the graceful poise of a dancer stretching. Several men cluster around the figure in the sphere of fluid, wearing face-concealing masks and goggles, their hands gloved. The man, I finally realise, squinting at this distance, is completely naked.  
I slump lower in my chair, feeling that this is not meant for my eyes, but keep my gaze fixed on the man.  
His mouth opens in a silent scream and I can see now the clod of thick wires that are going into his mouth, his nose – his body gives a violent jerk and I find myself gasping under my breath. This must be one of the Murkoff experiments, like the one Hempel volunteered for, perhaps as part of a social study. Yes, that's what this is. A social study. But the man jerks again as if shocked by invisible electricity, and the people surrounding him with the masks are jotting down notes. They're playing with knobs and buttons on a control panel beside the suspended sphere, and this man is clearly in pain. I'm finding myself rising out of my seat partially, and I don't know what I'm planning on saying, because for one thing the glass pane is far away and, for another, I still have the underlying fear that I'm not where I should be. But I side-step my desk and walk slowly, slowly, closer. Behind a long row of important-looking desks with super computers, wired to one another like twins, is the glass pane. To my left, a locked door bolted with metal leading into the room. On the table before me, the monitors show camera footage of the man's face, his pale blue eyes feverish with panic. One of the masked men makes a 'stop' gesture, shaking his head, and the humming noise in the room gradually dissipates. The man grows limp, twitching, and the upper hemisphere of the suspended tank is unlocked by one of the scientists, fluid drained away by huge tubes, leaving the patient slack, black hair sopping wet and plastered to his face. The wires are ripped from him with brutal force, and I bite back words of protest as the man heaves up the tail-end of the wires going down his throat. It feels like it takes minutes, watching him convulse and spasm, the wires endless, headed with small metal talons as if they've been gripping his insides. Then somebody says something, and a handgun is drawn from a pocket, the barrel placed to the blue-eyed man's head. It's only now that I lurch toward the glass, over the computers, and hammer my fists on the glass, hollering words that make no sense even as they leave my lips. I can feel my fists making the glass shudder, and it's as if the patient wakes up suddenly. His body comes alive and he leaps from the machine, hurtling towards me so violently that I stagger backward. An ear-ripping crash as he slams himself against the glass, screaming something.  
“Help me! Help – they're going to rape me! Rape! Rape!” He bellows, and the masked man with the gun turns to face me, and even though I can't see his expression, I can almost feel the murderous intent. Two of the others grapple with the taller, larger man, somehow holding him down, but he thrashes like a crocodile, turning his body this way and that, all the while screaming.  
“Help me! You can stop them – I know you can stop them! The monitor – press the button on the monitor-” His eyes meet mine with a burning flash as he looks over his shoulder towards me, but the gun is trained at me, through the glass, and I turn and run, my legs giving way and making me drop to the floor. I anticipate the ring of a bullet smashing through the glass, but it doesn't come, and I crawl across the floor back towards the desk. Voices are raised as the other workers rush out from the staff room, immediately seeing me crouched on the ground, the patient thrashing and screaming. Reptile-face spots me and strides across the room, and I shakily get my shoes on, get to my feet.  
“What have you done?” She snaps.  
“Nothing, I-”  
“Didn't Blaire brief you properly? Why aren't you helping them contain the patient?”  
“What?”  
Then some kind of realisation dawns upon her face, and she says, “Didn't you say you weren't being paid?”  
“No, I – I'm an unpaid intern.”  
And her face is in her hands. “Oh my god – of my fucking-” Then she turns and yells. “Himmel! Get security in here! This isn't the new employee, she's an impostor!”  
It's as if my legs turn to jelly underneath me, and I glance helplessly from the woman's face to the thrashing figure of the blue-eyed man behind the glass.  
“I'm sorry – I didn't mean to, I was just doing what I was told-” I stammer. “One of the nurses bought me here-”  
“One of the nurses? Which one?” She hisses, and she's seized my arm, has me in a vice-like grip. “Himmel!” She calls again, and I see the man nod, racing out the door.  
“I don't know!”  
She stares down into my face.  
“We've been betrayed by somebody – if you don't tell us who it was, right now, I'll make sure you never see the outside of these walls again.” She snarls. Himmel returns with the two men and their guns, and suddenly panic sets in. I glance around for some kind of escape and then spot a fire exit sign through the open door of the staff room, and twist my arm out of the woman's grip, bolting across the floor. One of the goddamn “formal” shoes slips off my heel and then gets lost somewhere between reptile-face and the exit door, and I hobble as fast as I can to my escape. Somebody seizes me by the jacket, I can't see who, but I get myself free and race out of the fire escape, into a parking lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fanfic is probably going to stray from canon in some respects, just for creative freedom - I know that the lab in the game is a little different. Expect that lost shoe to turn up later.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Consolidation.  
> Expect Eddie to come on the scene again very soon.

I run relentlessly, rounding the cars and sprinting towards the front of the building, squeezing past trash cans and checking the barbed-wire fence for any chink in its defences, anywhere I could squeeze through. My lungs sear with the cold air and my left foot, lacking its shoe, gathers gravel in its sole. I wince against the pain but adrenaline helps me ride it out, helps me stagger back to where Jess parked us earlier, her car now gone, and then I'm tearing past the white vans and out of the front gates, which are releasing a beeping sound as they're slowly closing behind me. Clearly someone has shut them, trying to keep me in.  
There's the steep decline of the hill to deal with, and I trip and hobble my way down the road, whipping past the curb and taking out my wallet as I reach the end of the turn-off for the hospital and find a lonely street with a bus stop. I clutch the edge of the bus shelter and shake so hard I can hardly keep myself upright, my eyes searching the horizon for something, anything. What if no bus comes? I should flag down a cab, but there's no guarantee there'll even be one. I could just keep running. I wonder what extent these people will go to to find me – what did I do? What exactly did I just witness? I scarcely have time to indulge these thoughts as a bus bobs over the horizon. I nearly fling myself out into the road with how voraciously I stick my arm out. Please stop. For God's sake, please stop. This bus won't take me back to the university halls, but in the general vicinity. I'll grab another bus once I get to the end of the line. I'll grab another hundred if I have to, just to get away from here. The bus stops before me and I leap on, handing the driver some change.  
“You okay?” He laughs. I don't answer. I take the ticket and amble to the back of the empty bus, putting myself in the corner in a quivering ball, zipping up my jacket. I turn and watch Mount Massive mental hospital appear and then disappear between the spires of green coniferous trees, my gaze fixed to it. I feel my heart rate decrease with every corner we turn away from the building, every street that passes, but I still draw my knees up to my chest. Tears bead in my eyes, and I rub them away with my faux leather jacket. I'm still shaking. 

 

I get back to the halls and take a shower. I don't even look anyone in the eye as I come in, despite a couple of friends waving and smiling. Then one of my friends in art class, Kayleigh, sees me and laughs.  
“How did you lose your shoe, Joan? What happened?”  
“I – I don't know. Just fell off at work.”  
“Oh, how did that go, by the way?”  
A pause.  
“Fine, thanks.” I smiled.  
The shower does absolutely nothing to calm me down, only washes off the smell of soup and my own foot sweat. The stench of having really fucked up doesn't leave. How am I even joking about this? I've got no idea. I dry myself off and Google 'responses to shock' to see if this is normal, crossing my legs and then uncrossing them, finding no comfort in any physical position. My red hair is sopping on my shoulders, dripping excess dye onto my bed clothes.  
“Shit!” I hastily wrap a towel around my head. I just need to breathe. Ordinarily, if something went very wrong and it were my fault, I'd call my mother so she could help me shift the blame onto someone else. But I can't shake the feeling that this is something I am solely responsible for. I close my eyes and replay the entire situation in my mind – the blue-eyed man smearing his body against the glass, the austere woman seizing me, the guns, losing my shoe, racing down the hill. God, my feet are killing me. Then I recall what the woman said, about me being an impostor, and the asinine smile of the nurse flashes before my eyes. She could not have misplaced me by accident, because I gave her my name – this means that she must have done it deliberately.  
I pause before searching my browser for Mount Massive mental hospital, finding no official website beyond telephone contacts and an address, when I had hoped to find something akin to a list of employees, some photographs of their faces, so I can find this nurse and 'contact' her, for lack of a better word. There's certainly going to be some contact between my fist and her face.  
A knock at the door makes my fingers spasm on the keyboard, and I take a moment before shakily saying, “Come in.”  
“Hey.” Jess enters with her dark hair in a long, mussed braid across one shoulder and some notes in her hand. “Are you studying?”  
“No.” I shrug my shoulders and then stretch on the bed, pushing my arms up and trying to release the tension in my upper back. “Just searching the internet for things.”  
“So, how did it go?” She comes and seats herself on the end of my bed, flopping onto her side and curling into a ball. I meet her gaze and find that my stomach is twisting itself into all kinds of shapes, and then it's too late for me to lie, because she's seen the look of terror and helplessness on my face.  
“There's something going on in that hospital that isn't right.” I say. To my surprise, she laughs.  
“What?” Her eyes glitter, and this makes me want to talk even more.  
“Something happened – one of the nurses directed me to the wrong lab, and there was... some kind of experiment being conducted on one of the patients. This man, he... I think he's in serious trouble. It looked like he was in pain.”  
Jess's face falls, and her brows knit. “But he volunteered for it, right? No one can conduct an experiment without the consent of the person. Surely, they'd be safe.”  
“A man put a gun to his head for some reason – perhaps the experiment wasn't working and they needed to... dispose of him somehow.”  
“Are you sure it was a real gun?”  
“I don't know. He didn't fire any bullets while I was there. But there were two men by the door holding weapons – I thought it was for protection against anyone trying to steal the resources, the records or the chemicals. I knew that they conducted experiments of some kind, but I knew nothing of this Murkoff program. That's why I wanted to work there, because of the experiments, but – but that was not normal. The man lunged for the glass window,” I find my hands stretched out before me, mimicking him, re-living it. “He was screaming. It's like I can still hear him screaming.”  
Silence for several moments, then a choked sob leaves my throat and Jess leans over and embraces me.  
“It's okay.”  
But now I'm getting hysterical. “The woman who worked there realised I was in the wrong place, and they got the guards to follow me with guns – I ran out, I got the bus back here – oh my god, will they come here?”  
“No, don't be ridiculous.”  
“The nurse led me there – why would she do that? If she knew what I'd see, or what they'd do to me?”  
“Maybe she made a mistake. Maybe she genuinely didn't mean to do it.” Jess says reassuringly, although I can feel her shaking against me.  
“She smiled like she knew what she was doing.” Then it occurs to me. “What if they didn't even need interns for filing things, and she made it up to lure some poor sod in?”  
“Stop it, Joan-”  
“What if that nurse wanted people to know about the experiments?” I pull back and hold Jess by the shoulders, meeting her gaze. She looks as terrified as I feel, but now the pieces are falling into place. Now it's beginning to make sense.  
“Why you, though?”  
I groan and flop back on the bed. “No idea, but I wish I hadn't taken the job.”  
Jess draws my laptop onto her legs and cocks her head to one side. She sighs. “You've been looking for the nurse, haven't you?”  
“Yeah.”  
“You're not doing a very good job.” She says. “I know a guy in computing who can hack data – he rooms only on the other side of the art building.”  
“No, Jess-”  
She puts out a hand to stop me. “He's good, he can get online files meant for private use, he's done it a million times before and he's never been caught. Don't chicken out of this one, Joan, okay? This is serious shit.”  
“I don't want to cause a controversy, I just want to know that-” I trail off, lost for words. My heart feels like it's being slowly torn asunder. “I want to know that the guy is okay. Because I ran away, when I should have helped him. I was a coward. I should call the police, right now.” I get up and head for my mobile, sitting silent next to the sink in the en suite, but Jess seizes my wrist. She shakes her head.  
“We don't know enough about the situation to act yet.”  
“What? The right answer is obvious, what if that man is being tortured right now? What if he's already dead and they've got the next guy lined up?”  
“Joan, do you remember last summer, when there were all those news articles about the man from the mental hospital, who set himself on fire in the parking lot? People all said he was just another maniac, but do you remember what he said before he died? He left a note that said he had been turned into a monster.”  
Her words are making me sick to my stomach, and there's a part of me that does remember those stories, but if what she's saying is true, I won't know what to think. I don't want the lines of good and bad to be blurred any more than they have today.  
“No way is that true.” I murmur, and she grimaces.  
“He'd written about needles and chemicals-”  
“That was just a rumour.”  
“From eyewitness accounts! There was a young nurse who found the letters in the man's room before he escaped and burnt himself to death. She made statements about the letters, but when the police searched the building, the letters couldn't be found.”  
“And the police withheld the autopsy findings from the public.” I say, and the words are like lead. “For reasons undisclosed.”  
“I'm sorry.” She says quietly, holding my hand now. “But do you want to risk it? I mean, do you really think you could trust them?”  
I sit back down on the bed beside her.  
“Then what do we do?”  
“We find out who the hell that nurse is.” 

 

I'm crouched on the floor in the kitchen in a crumpled t-shirt from two days ago and shorts, scrubbing at a spillage that's congealed underneath the sink. I grit my teeth and bite the insides of my cheeks as I fervently scrub away, trying not to think of the reality of the situation.  
“Leave it. Let Tom clean it up, he made the mess.” Jess says from where she sits on the edge of the counter, calling her friend in computing. The phone rings but he doesn't pick up.  
“Hmph.” I respond, scrubbing with even greater effort. Then exhaustion hits me and I flop on the floor, sat on my haunches, looking out at the silhouettes of the university buildings against the blood-red skyline. The sun sets from behind copses of maple trees.  
“Haven't you got counselling tonight?” She says as she looks at the clock on the wall.  
“I'm not going.” I mumble, prying my shirt away from where it's sticking at the underarms – clearly I've been cleaning too hard and I'm perspiring in buckets.  
“Why not?”  
“Because... because everything.” I shake my head. “I just want to disappear right now.” A shaft of hot sunlight creeps over the floor, illuminating the red strands of my hair swinging by my cheeks, making Jess' eyes look pale gold.  
“It's not your fault.”  
“It is – I ran away. Besides, I knew from the second that I walked in that it was all wrong. Something in my gut told me to run away. I was a fucking coward.” I snarl with a vehemence that shocks even me, dropping the sponge back into the water-filled bucket and putting my face in my hands. “I should have stopped it. I should have – do you ever think about situations, horrible situations, like a terrorist attack, and you secretly hope that if it ever happened, you would be the one to do what was right? You hope that if the worst happened, you'd drag the people out of the burning building, you'd help the injured, you'd take a bullet for your friend. I always thought I was good inside. But now I know that I'm not.” I look up at her, and her face shows solemn understanding. “I have to make it right.”  
“Out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness?” She says.  
“No. Because I want him to survive.”  
“You want him to survive so you can live with yourself.” She deadpans, and my heart sinks. “Is that true kindness, or an exercise in vanity?”  
“I – God. Okay-” Tears in my eyes again. Her words make me sink even lower, and I find that I can't deal with it anymore. “Where's your computing friend?”  
“Science block. Room D. His name's Lenny.”  
“Cool. Thanks.” Then I get up and leave, hands closed into fists by my sides.  
I step out into dusk with my leather jacket over my shoulders, storming past the concrete square and the duck pond, towards Room D. There are a myriad of reasons why Jess and I are such close friends, and white lies is not one of them. She has a knack for honesty so brutal that we've fallen out many times before, simply because she has the ability to deliver a piece of criticism like a death blow, and also because my trust in myself has always been thread-bare at best. She reminds me of my sister in some ways – both of them have a gift for seeing people as they truly are. Which is a joy to be around, except for the instances when I am on the receiving end of it. My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I know it's her before I even read the message.  
'I'm sorry xx' it reads. 'It's okay, don't worry xxx' is my instant reply. And once I've crossed the square and am leaning against the white-lit entrance to the science block, with its computer hum and plush red seats, I wait for several minutes in the pale glow of the bulbs, because knowing her she'll be out in a second to come with me. The sky is a carpet speckled with stars like dust above me, the moon a sallow, sleepy thing suspended in the sky. Like the pale figure of the man in the fluid, encased in the sphere. I notice the parallel between man and moon and my heart beats a little faster. Had he not been somehow beautiful, with eyes that cut through my skin, would I be as concerned about his safety as I am now? I hope so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is pretty much solely for these OC's that I know very little about, but want to look like fleshed-out, real people. There's nothing worse than OC's that fall flat or just aren't realistic (or have ridiculous names like 'Venus Darkmane', etc, etc. You get what I mean.)
> 
> Constructive crit is welcome as always.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A hacked computer and a car ride.   
> Things are more complex than she first thought.

Jess crosses the square at a leisurely jog, and I wave to her.  
“You waited?” She pants as she nears me, grinning.  
“I thought you'd probably come.” I reply, quirk a small smile, and link my arm with hers. “I'm sorry for being such a twat.”  
“S'ok. I expected as much.” She shoots back, and leads me into Room D, where I'm introduced to Lenny. He's a lean, dark-haired Hispanic boy with quick eyes and an even quicker tongue. He pushes aside the half-empty crisp packets littering his working space and has us sit down, gabbling about his computer sciences assignment.   
“I've spent over a week on this thing already, just look – thirty pages of analysis.” He sighs, tugging at his bottom lip distractedly. His eyes look tired, rheumy and distant in the cold computer light. “You called me?” He asks Jess without looking at her.  
“Yeah.”  
“Sorry, I have my phone off usually – I get nuisance calls all the time. What did you want to talk about?”  
“We need to track down a nurse at Mount Massive. Get things like her name, her address.”   
He snorts. “Sounds a bit illegal.” Quirks an eyebrow my way. “My favourite.” 

 

The nurse, we discover, is Norma Frasier, and she's been employed at Mount Massive mental hospital since the late 1980's. I feel a pang of guilt wriggle its way into my chest, wondering if I may have cost her her job. Except, of course, she's done this of her own volition, and I have to remind myself of this as the three of us stare dumbly at her picture on the screen. It's her company ID, and I feel my skin prickle just looking at these private documents.  
“This was a bad idea.” I murmur, and Lenny meets my gaze.  
“I don't know what you two are doing, but I want to know nothing. Do you understand?” He says quietly. His dark eyes flick back to the screen, where that small picture of the nurse is floating dismembered in cyberspace. They have so much information on her it's baffling – blood type, retinal scans, CT and brain scans, and data on her familial relations. She's twice divorced and lives in an apartment block downtown with her son on his early twenties and her mother, who is disabled.   
“Okay.” I respond, because Jess is uncharacteristically silent next to me. I turn to her. “What is it?”  
“None of this adds up. Look at the level of security they employ.” She trails off, squinting at the dark webpage and moving closer. “How did you even get in?”  
“No idea.”  
“We need to find her.” She resolves, grabbing my hand under the table in reassurance. “We should get up tomorrow morning and skip lectures-”  
“Jess, no. She might not even be in.”  
“But she will be if we call her and explain.” And with one movement she withdraws her mobile and Lenny starts in his seat, clearly spooked.  
“Look, I don't want to be involved in this-”  
“You're not. Don't worry.” Jess snaps, giving the phone to me. “There's her number, you call it.” Her eyes hold mine and I swallow. I press in the number with my fingers, clumsy as I feel their eyes on me. The luminescent, moon-like glow of the screen glares into my eyes, and I hear the dialling tone. The sound makes my stomach churn. I bite my lip and drum my fingers against my leg, never breaking eye contact with Jess. The picture of Norma is reflected, miniscule, incapsulated in her brown iris.  
“Hello?” The nurse's voice fills the receiver, and I suddenly feel nauseous. “Who is this?”   
“I – uhm-” This is ridiculous. Hearing her voice, her casual complacency, takes all the urgency out of me. “It's Joan Casey. The intern.”  
And there's no reply for a moment. I can hear white noise in the background of the call, the woman's breathing.  
“Hello?” I ask softly, licking my lips, trying to return moisture to my parched mouth.   
“They've been questioning the hospital staff all day.” She then says, under her breath, a quiet utterance. “Interrogations, some kind of – some kind of torture going on in the back rooms – completely upsetting all the patients.”  
I don't know how to respond to this sudden surge of dialogue, so I simply ask, “Is he alive?”  
“Who?”   
“The patient. The one in the laboratory.”  
“Which one? They are plenty. The Murkoff experiments have been going on for years without so much as a hitch.” She says it calmly, as if it's nothing of consequence.   
“Okay, but can you tell me what went on today? You sent me to the laboratory.” Then the memories flood back, and I can see Lenny watching me in horror. Jess has a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his seat. “You must have done it for a reason, why did you-”  
“Be quiet!” She hisses. “They could be tapping this phone line. This is a conversation to be held in person.”  
“Can't you just tell me why-”  
“Are you completely ignoring everything I'm saying? The security is now at an all-time high. They know where we live, and could be listening in at any moment. Can you meet me tomorrow? Nine in the morning?”  
“Yeah.”  
She rattles off her address, but I cut her short with, “I know. I know where you live, we've researched.”  
“We?”  
“My friend and I.”  
She makes a noise somewhere between surprise and approval. “I had a feeling there was something good about you; resourceful. Goodnight, Joan.” Then she hangs up, and I'm left feeling like I've just surfaced from a great pool, gasping for air. 

 

The morning encroaches, blood red as the evening before, and I can't help but feel a strange whirl of emotions in the pit of my stomach, as if yesterday is going to repeat itself. There's the same morning-dew smell on the air, the laziness of spring as it tries to crawl from underneath the rubble of decomposing leaves in their umber, their magenta, their hot molten brown. Jess lolls her head back against the passenger seat as I drive, and her eyes are rimmed with shadow. The road before us stretches long, and my eyes flick nervously to the cars around me, looking for any vehicle from the hospital. They could still be looking for us.  
“You couldn't sleep either?” I ask her, and she grumbles. Our brown paper bag of cakes from the coffee shop on campus slumps on her legs and the smell of our morning coffee drifts up to me from the cup holders on the left hand side of the car. A couple drops of coffee tipple out as I take a hard turn right, down another street filled with apartments. The bloodied sunlight falls in shafts between the buildings – I look up at them, washing line after washing line. Pants and shirts all bleached in the morning light.  
“No. I had so many nightmares.” She says. “I usually never have nightmares.”  
“What about?”  
“Stupid things. Some man coming into our halls, standing in the kitchen. The lights were off and his eyes glowed. He looked like how you described the patient.”  
“The blue eyes?”  
“No, they were bright, glowing white. Fucking terrified me. But the feeling I got – it was like the feeling you described to me.” She unwraps the bag and picks at a muffin. “Like being cut open.”  
“Hmm.” I don't tell her my dream. I had a succession of them, one after the other, of an old house I used to know. The little black crucifixes mounted on the walls, their miniature versions of Jesus, somebody's hands slipping down my underwear as I lay back on the couch. There's sunlight and the windows are all open, and I can smell mint sauce. Vomit rears in the back of my throat just thinking about it, so I push the thoughts roughly from my mind.  
“Are you okay?” She asks, handing me a chunk of muffin and practically shoving it against my mouth. I grumble but accept it, licking my lips.   
“Thanks.”  
“You can't even eat properly, Joan, you're a lost cause. I'm so done with you.” She rolls her eyes and dramatically flops back down in her seat, and this makes me laugh. Then my eyes return to the road and I realise where we are, see the street name, and I nearly swerve the car into the door of a garage in my panic. “Calm down. Jesus.”  
“I'm fine.”  
“You want me to park?”  
I pout, shaking my head, and make a particular effort to park the car nicely, between a Fiesta and a BMW that somebody clearly can't afford to keep clean. One of those people who buy things just to be flashy. God, I hate it when people do that.   
We get out the car holding our coffee, a third for our mystery nurse, as a 'please don't send me back to the mental hospital' offering. Jess and I fall in step and she goes to light a cigarette, but I slap it from her hand.  
“Come on, there's no time for that.”  
“Always time for a smoke.”  
I hiss in response and she puts it away, racing up the corrugated iron stairs with me until we reach the third floor, overlooking the city. The clouds in their coagulated shades of scarlet, puce, gold, and the sky bleeding blue up above us. The horizon is so bright it looks molten. We're stood in front of a knackered brass plate reading '32, Frasier.' Jess simply stares at me for a moment.  
“You want me to knock, don't you?” I ask with dread. She nods slowly, and I shakily press my fingers to the weathered knocker. There's the sound of movement inside and my heart rate begins to hitch. The door moves aside and there, stood in the nurse attire of a pressed shirt and slacks, stands Norma Frasier. I realise now how little attention I had paid to her face, compared to how voraciously I'm trying to remember her features now.  
“Come in.” She says, holding open the door. “Is this your friend?”  
“Jess.” She answers for herself. Thank God, because I don't know if I can even utter a word right now. This woman's mousy hair, the smile lines around her eyes, and the even more prominent ones speaking of worry, regurgitate the entirety of yesterday. She smiles and it makes me scared all over again.  
She closes the door behind us and invites us into her small kitchen with greenish linoleum and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a cockerel and a hen. There's a kettle boiling, the old kind, on the stove and who I can only presume must be her son is skulking around in the hallway wearing jogging pants and a Depeche Mode t-shirt. I feel out of place.  
“Tea?”  
“No thank you.” We answer in unison.  
“But we brought you coffee. To say thank you for having us.” Jess supplies, and I'm inwardly smiling.   
“Oh, really – thank you. That's nice.” She seems genuinely pleased, and her soft features settle so easily into a smile it's like the feeling of putting on a very old leather jacket and noticing all the creases where it's moulded to your shape. She sniffs the coffee. “Is that a caramel latte? I love them.” A pause, and she looks at us both. “You must have a lot of questions.” Then she looks at me only and points a finger at Jess. “Does she know?”  
“What happened? Oh, yeah. I think I told her almost everything.”  
“You must have had quite a fright.”  
I laugh for some reason. My cheeks colour, and I find it hard to speak. There's a lull before Norma says, “This is my son, Erik.” And she gestures out into the hall. Erik is immersed in his mobile but glances up and awkwardly waves, probably wondering who the heck we are.  
“Can I get right to the point?” I blurt suddenly, my hands shaking a little on the kitchen table between her and I. Her eyes are now sharper, paler, somehow and the levity is gone. She nods quite seriously. “Is the patient alive?”  
Her mouth twists into an awkward grimace, and she looks like she wants to say something, but she stops herself. “I don't know. Why, did you know him?”  
“No, I just – I.” I can't speak.   
“She feels responsible.” Jess says, and my cheeks burn. I throw her a scalding glare.   
“Oh, I understand.” Norma nods, and she looks at me almost pityingly. “The thing is, none of this is your fault. I hope you understand that it's nothing personal. I've worked at Mount Massive for about twenty years now, after I had Erik, and the Murkoff experiments have been happening for several years. There were experiments from the day I joined, and this was expected, you see. It was a given. But they were of a more primitive nature, and so we all – the girls and I, the nurses – we tolerated it.” She takes a sip of the coffee we brought her and interjects, “This is really good. Thanks.” Then her eyes find the floor and she looks a little self-conscious. “I'll admit that in the beginning I had a blinkered view of these patients – it was tough. At first I pitied them, I empathised with them, and then when I learned of all the... the damage, the hatred they possessed, I was happy to see them be experimented on. But it was nothing severe, just for research into how to cure diseases like cystic fibrosis, and the like. Then Blaire became head of the research unit, and Murkoff was created. Then, things became... out of control.”  
“Like the articles last year, the news story about the man in the fire?” Jess asks quietly.   
“Blaire has been caught up with covering his tracks ever since that episode.”  
“So, they were experimenting on him?” I say.  
“Of course.” She shrugs a shoulder. “I won't talk about it here because, well, it's not good for conversation.” Then she looks up at me. “The advertisements for work – they were fake.”  
I nod, arms folded, feeling my heart flip in agitation, in anger at this woman. How dare she-  
“They had another employee due to start that day. She came in, and I had her dealt with, knocked out and put in a storeroom.”  
“What about the men by the door?”  
“They were with me.” She says. “The thing about Blaire is that he's not a humanitarian. You know what happens when a man like that tries to exhort authority over everyone else? They get tired of the bullshit.”  
Jess stiffens when she says this, looking visibly shaken that such a gentle woman would use such language.   
“Why did it have to be me?” I ask.  
“It didn't have to be you. Sorry to say that, but it was for one reason and one reason only – you looked a lot like the girl they employed.” She grimaces. “Blaire doesn't care about one girl who organises files.”  
“If the security is so tight, how come it even worked?” I don't find myself irked in the least by my lack of importance. In fact, it relieves some of the tension from my shoulders.  
She laughs. “Have you not met a men with power? Arrogance, vanity, so many things. The plan was that they would not realise who you were – the plan was that I'd find you, take you aside and brief you, but I wanted to do it that evening, when it was quieter. I was going to get you to tap into their video feeds, their archives, their files. An assistant eventually gets the keys to all those goodies – I wanted to dismantle Murkoff from the inside out.”  
It all seems to make sense.   
“You don't think the new employee would've done that?”  
“God, no. Not a chance. She would have been one of them, one of the laboratory lot. A scientist whose only concern is for progress, progress, progress... even if it's at the cost of our ethics.” Her face falls. “None of this has gone to plan. I can't say what Blaire will do next – I have no idea if anybody is safe, whether I need to bluff and wait this out, or whether Erik and I should pack up and leave for good.”  
My stomach churns. “Is it... that serious?”  
“I'm afraid that by getting you involved, I might be as corrupt as Blaire... I might be losing my own humanity.” She says. “So, for that reason, I'm going to ask you to not stay involved. Disappear. Go back to your university and don't go to that hospital again – I've cleared all traces of you from my personal records, and I've sent my two friends, the ones you met by the door, to clear the CCTV footage.”  
“And if it doesn't work, what then?”  
“Then I will owe you an apology.” She says earnestly. “I thought that it would be easier somehow, that I had waited long enough for Blaire to trust me.”  
“You should have briefed me as soon as I get there.”  
“I should have, waiting was a stupid idea – actually, no. No. I shouldn't have gotten you involved at all.” She looks me up and down with melancholy. “I made a mistake.”   
“But, about the patient – do you have any information?” I'm becoming desperate now.  
“The man you saw in the laboratory was Eddie Gluskin, guilty of multiple homicides and torture against women. He's a misogynist. He's been at many mental hospitals, and none have bettered him. I wouldn't waste your time worrying about such a man.”  
I swallow hard, and the next words are somehow choked. “Then why do you care about letting people know? If the experiments are on these kind of people... why bother?”  
“Because it's still not right, in spite of everything they've done. Because I think that Murkoff is the greater evil." Her voice breaks and the steam from the coffee spirals up towards the ceiling. "Because part of me still wants to fix them."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (TW for mentions of rape.)
> 
> She realizes she has to go back.

Two months elapse, and I obey Nurse Frasier's wishes. With our end of year assessments looming, I find myself wrapped up in campus life, spending my days and nights in the open-all-hours art studio building, studying with Jess. I attend the open-mic nights at the clubs in the city and the whole place seems abloom with the honey of summer, the smell of liquor on the evening air, soy sauce and sticky rice in our favourite restaurants, lacing my fingers in front of me and watching the warm lamplight dance over them. My hands and wrists are almost perpetually stained with oil paint, and my working space has the walls plastered with notes in my slanting handwriting, crookedly spiralling over post-it notes and pages. Paintings fill my works-space – my older ones, my life drawings, and now recent ones with recurring motifs of light refracting on glass, blues and greens as if the canvas is submerged in fluid, claret hues dispersing like ink on water. One particularly large painting stares me down from the wall, of a pair of languid blue eyes. I sit on the floor with my tools around me, drinking tea, often looking up at it, at the words I scribbled around the edges of the retinas. My professor leans against the door-frame and observes it wonderingly, and I don't know if he likes it or not.

A patchwork of days where the weather fogs hotter and I pet the cat that rolls on its back in the sun between the halls and the library, scratching her belly. She mewls at me as if complaining about something, and I nod and talk back. I have calls from my mother, skype conversations with my younger sister, all diverting me from the one thing I really want to think about. The mental hospital. Murkoff. Gluskin. When my end-of-year art assessment is over, I collapse onto the bed with a blinding migraine and a half-empty cup of coffee, flip open my laptop and tell myself it's time to decide what I'm going to do about this. My fingers rest on the keys and the darkness slips down in the sky like a soft visor over the world. Purple and blue and green lingering like algae on the horizon, light sunlight dappled from between the arms of trees.  
I google 'Murkoff corporation' with my stomach flipping, turning somersaults, and the search engine takes its sweet time.  
“Hurry up. Hurry the fuck up.” I grumble into my pillow, hiding my face in it. My head is pounding. Did they find his body in a ditch somewhere? Is Norma even still safe? What if something happened and Murkoff went bust?  
To my absolute relief, there's no files reporting any deaths. In fact, there's scarcely any reports at all. A small pop-up says most of my search results have been removed under certain infringements of privacy rights, and I scoff. Sure. But there's one small picture that catches my eye, of a high-browed, dark-haired man with pale blue eyes and a cruel twist to his lip, eye sockets depressed into shadow. I immediately click the link and find myself on a newspaper article, a report entitled 'Misogynist Murderer Eddie Gluskin Admitted to Mental Hospital – A Massive Mistake?' Then there's a photograph of the hospital from the outside, at an austere-looking low angle, probably taken by some over-zealous student. The alliterative pun in the title makes me grumble.  
“Tabloids..." I mutter.  
My finger hesitates to close the window, but I can see the cut-off point where the photo of Eddie Gluskin is partially visible at the bottom of my screen, his dark widow's peak. I scroll down and digest snippets of the article; 'Gluskin was incarcerated at Long Lake penitentiary with a lifetime sentence on five counts of murder against local women. Recently the authorities at the penitentiary deemed him psychologically unstable. Gluskin will be referred to Mount Massive mental hospital later this week, and a passionate outcry from the family of his first murder victim Charlotte Henley has been made, pleading for this criminal “to be subjected to his sentence and brought to justice.” The hospital have made no official statement about the nature of Gluskin's mental condition, but a source from Long Lake Middle-School, where the Gluskin attended, described him as “reserved but unusually charming.” The source speaks of his behaviour as “seemingly normal and healthy for a young man, although lacking parental support to pursue his education.”'  
Following this is a hackneyed, probably well-revised, closing line; 'In light of these discoveries, is it more accurate that Gluskin chose to murder out of cold-heartedness, not as a product of mental instability?' I sit and stare at my tiny pixellated cursor resting over the last couple of letters, still shaken by the words. Below the end of the article, just above the comments section, is a small photograph of Gluskin as a boy, wearing an unsure, lopsided smile and ogling the camera. It looks to me like the smiles people wear when they've lost somebody and the socially-accepted period for grieving has passed, but they're still in mourning. It's like a scratch-card, like I could claw at the picture with my nail and peel the smile away to find the hurt behind it. Anyone with a brain could see that something is amiss, and I wonder if the article is a ploy somehow.  
“Lacking parental support.” I find myself murmuring. Then the realisation that I'm pitying a person guilty of abominable crimes hits me in a rolling wave and I click out of the window, shut the laptop and fix my eyes on the evening sky instead. The moon is nowhere to be seen.

 

I spend the long summer break back at my childhood house, with the wrap-around porch in the flaking cream paint, the old swings in the backyard with the muddied skid under the left swing all grassed-over in my absence. The our new cat curls her black shape into my waist where I recline on the wooden bench my dad cobbled together, and I scratch the top of her head. A lazy, half-asleep mewl. The birch and sycamore trees in the yard rustle their branches and lose some leaves, coasting on the hot air. Memories assaulting me, the absence of my therapist leaving a well in my chest that I'm, every day, filling with this little cat's presence. I realise I'm scared of being alone. And when I'm not, I can feel that something is wrong, there is something distinctly different from my energy when I compare it to my family. My sister is collecting daisies, my mother is talking to my dad about the election in the kitchen with the door open.  
Over the past few weeks, I've realised why Mount Massive has occupied my thoughts so much. I've got out my counselling worksheets and thrifted through, sat on my bed cross-legged and tried to figure this out. I'm identifying with Gluskin because of what he said, before they forced him into the Morphogenic Engine. He said that doctors were going to rape him. Again. And he hadn't used the word with the complacence or irony that I so often hear it used with on campus, tailored onto the end of a wanna-be edgy joke. I remember the ripple of muscle in his shoulders and the look of paralytic terror rending his face, and I felt it in my gut. The fear. The words he said evoke it all, bring the events all up to the surface.  
I was fifteen when it happened. It was my first love, although whenever I look back I mentally scribble out 'love' and re-write it as 'infatuation.' The boy was average looking. I could have done better, so said all my friends, but I was interested by his nature, the restlessness and his humour. He split up with his girlfriend one day and we hugged in the rain while walking back from school and, my clothes run through with sleet, he felt like a heater. We saw each other and it was tentative and all the while my mind was reeling and I was swept away with the idea that he loved me, and he said so many times. He loved me.  
Then I met his family and was ensconced in the barred cage of their house with their incessant questioning and their religious figures around the house. It was like they decided they wanted Jesus to be everywhere, and in hindsight it makes me laugh – small figures of Christ crammed into every workspace, every wall. They probably had him under the bath-mat and in the refrigerator.  
I remember how it felt when it started. The nagging for sex. The insatiable litany of wanting to fuck me here, fuck me there, anywhere would do – in the bathroom, with no contraception, with his parents in the next room. He didn't care. My cheeks just flushed red and I refused it all, made excuses, until excuses didn't stop it. There's a line, you see, and once you dip your toes into the chalk of consent and blur it, it's like a wrestling match with elbows in faces, knees in the gut, and you don't know who is right and who is wrong, because you're too young and you don't even know what the rules in this fight are. That's the only way I can describe it. Being told that 'No' means 'I don't love you', and being naive enough to believe it. It happened in my childhood bed, an empty house, his hands in my hair, complaints dying in my mouth. Sperm clotting my throat, being pushed away and left there. Done.  
I've been told that there's exquisite pleasure in performing a Godless act in a Holy place. Maybe that explains it. Maybe nothing will. I have counseling to suck the poison out and try to flick that switch inside my mind so the light of hope and trust falters back into action. I get the electricity going most of the time but I realise that some nights it just cuts out, I get blackouts, and I have to light myself a candle and sing to stay brave. I realise now that seeing Gluskin lit one such candle. Perhaps, for my sake more than his, I can't bear the thought of it going out.  
The black cat next to me raises her head and blinks at me as if she felt the hurtling colours of those memories as they dragged through my imagination. She mewls softly and I return to scratching her ears, and the purrs are comfort enough to tell me that it's okay. It's all over, so what's the good in thinking of it, anyway? Despite what Nurse Frasier said, despite her cautions, I know which way my heart is tugging me, and it leads right back to the hospital. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Found this one very emotional to write. I felt like I owed Joan some extra down-time before heading back to the asylum.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She gets what she wants, just not in the way she expected.
> 
> TW for needles and suggested gore.

Jess parks her car askew beside my dad's and leaps out, laptop and charger under her arm, keys swinging on the index finger of her other hand. I wave from the front door and invite her in, exhaling and rubbing my temples in the places where a headache has made its home. Since my decision to return to Mount Massive, the panic has been crawling underneath my skin as to whether or not I should tell Jess. As anyone could probably tell from from my sweaty palms and unwashed coffee mugs littering the kitchen, I've decided to tell her.  
“Joan, you won't believe it.” She sighs and sinks down into the pale blue fabric of the couch, the cat prodding her nose and then her feet into Jess' lap.  
“Hmm?” I say distractedly as she plugs her laptop into the mains, signs into our wifi as she's so accustomed to doing.  
“You know Kayleigh, our so-called friend?” She gnaws her teeth, and I brace myself for whatever she has to say.  
“Oh, no.” I grumble, filling another mug with tea and coming to sit beside her, the cat nonchalant between us. “She and Jason are dating, aren't they?”  
“Not even that. They're non-exclusively seeing each other, which of course means it's just for sex.” She sneers, rolling her eyes. “She's not a patch on you, okay? You and Jason were good together for a time but, come on, he was an arrogant dickhead. A proper shitbag. You're better off without-”  
“I know. I know, Jess. Thanks.” I breathe, and my stomach is flipping somersaults. I remember Jason's languid gait, the length of his shadow drawn out over the concrete on my way to the English buildings. I remember the crumpled leather of his jacket over the back of my desk chair and his fingers trailing over my collarbone, and me cocking my head to one side and seeing someone who loved me. You can be wrong about people sometimes. But this, this inconsequential boy, isn't what I want to be thinking, nor talking, about.  
“Are you okay?” Jess murmurs, and she puts her hand on mine. I lean into her and twine my fingers with hers, and the cat gives a small shriek as she is almost crushed between us. “I'm sorry, man. I just couldn't stop myself from saying something, because I was so angry.” And she's telling the truth, of course she is. She shakes beside me. “It's a good thing you're not online because, dear God, they don't shut up about each other.”  
“Uh huh. Low self-esteem, right?”  
“Right. The more you see of a relationship in public, the worse it is in private. That's, like, a cardinal rule of dating.” She nudges me then meets my gaze. “Something's up, isn't it? You can tell me.”  
“It's not about Jason.” I murmur, and she opens her mouth to speak before thinking better of it. “What are you thinking?” I ask quietly, and I can tell by the look in her dark eyes that she's almost there, she's nearly there with me. Her gaze flips the pages of the book until she lands on the page with the folded-over corner.  
“You know Norma said to leave it alone.” She says very quietly.  
“I can't. I've been thinking about it, Jess, and I can't leave it. I have to help show people what Murkoff is doing.”  
“That means you want proof, don't you?” She props her chin in her hands, then adds, “And proof means going back.”  
“Yeah. Going back.” I say to myself, as if to solidify the notion.  
“Is this because of the headlines in the paper this morning?” She frowns.  
“What?”  
“The hospital is officially shutting down. The staff are being transferred to another facility down South, about an hours drive from here. The windows will be boarded up, the whole place derelict. Nobody wants to buy it, at least not right now. Not with the stigma still surrounding it from last summer.”  
“And Norma?”  
“No obituaries with her name. But I think we should call her, Joan.” Jess says with sudden fear in her eyes and I nod, moving to the landline and copying Norma's home number from Jess's mobile to the pad. The dialling tone from the old, mauled white phone fills my left ear and I drum my fingernails upon the window-seat, anticipating her voice. The first call gets put through to voice mail, so we try again, then time I wedge the receiver between my cheek and my shoulder, kneading the soft black fur of the cat as she trots over, flicking her ears back and forth.  
“Good afternoon.” A voice says, male and resonant.  
“Hi, is Norma Frasier there?” I ask, but a feeling of dread settles in my gut. The call is completely silent excluding the soft buzz of the line. The kettle isn't boiling, there's no sound of a show on TV, or the voice of her son.  
“I'm sorry, Mrs Frasier is indisposed right now. Can I take a message?” I lift my eyes to Jess' and she returns my panicked gaze. Her husband is dead, and it didn't look as if she was seeing anyone - no tell-tale signs, no aftershave or men's shoes in the hallway. So who is this? My hand stills in the cat's pelt and suddenly it's difficult to breathe.  
“Is this Erik?” I ask slowly, and there's a lull in sound from the other end of the line.  
“Erik Frasier is also unable to talk right now.” The man says, and there's a cocky lilt to the words, an edge of frustration creeping in. “If you want to speak to the Frasier's, Miss Casey, I suggest you come to their apartment, right now, and come and see me.”  
“I'd rather not. How do you know my name?” I snap, my stomach tying itself in sickened knots.  
“This is not a request. This is a threat. Don't you understand what a threat is, Miss Casey?”  
“What have you done with them?” My hand begins to shake and Jess moves closer, putting her hand on the receiver, next to mine. She mouths something unintelligible in my haze of panic, then grabs the phone from me.  
“Whoever you are, stop fucking around – I have a sawn-off shotgun in the back of my car and if you don't stop talking shit, I'll make sure the bullets find a home in your mouth.” She rises to her feet and spits the words down the receiver, cheeks aflame. I stare up at her from the ground, tug at her wrist.  
“Jess, what are you doing? You don't know who he is, he could be-”  
“To whom am I speaking?” The voice says. “Hmm? Who's making their own little threats? Because it certainly isn't Miss Casey. I've had the pleasure of watching her run and hide from my people once already, cower like a lame dog. You must be a cocky friend of hers.”  
“You're from Murkoff?” She retorts. “Fuck you!” I leap from my sitting position and try to wrestle the phone of out her hands, but the authority in the ensuing voice makes us both stop still.  
“This phone line is currently being tapped – we have your location. Now, if you know what's good for you, you'll sit down, stay calm, and wait for me to arrive. Is that alright, ladies?”  
Jess and I simply stare at one another, and I shake my head fervidly at her, lean in and whisper, “Don't say anything, okay? You don't know what kind of power they might have.”  
“Well, we can't fucking stay here, can we? Then they'll definitely find us.”  
“What about my family, Jess? They'll be back soon and we can't-” Nausea grips me at the thought. “We can't put them in danger.”  
Her furious expression falters and she gives the phone to me. The cat darts into the corner of the room and arches her back, her pale eyes slicing between us both.  
“It's Joan Casey speaking. We don't want any trouble.” I say shakily. “Who are you?”  
“My name is Jeremy Blair.” The name punctures a hole through my gut. The employer, the one Norma spoke about. The leader of the Murkoff corporation. “I own Murkoff and Mount Massive hospital.”  
“Well, okay – this is all just one big misunderstanding. One of your employees wanted me to, uh, help them by telling making public what Murkoff is doing, finding proof of inhumane experiments, and I-” I can hardly speak, the feeling of betrayal rising up in my throat like vomit. But if this man finds my family, if he finds my little sister- “I didn't want to be a part of it. I saw no records, okay? Nothing. We are not a danger.”  
“Ah, and yet you visited Norma Frasier only two months ago. How stupid do you think I am?” He bellows, snarling down the phone.  
“It's not our fault! Please, you have to-”  
“You are a bug on the windscreen of the Murkoff corporation, you and your cocky shit of a friend. If you leave your house, we will find you, and everyone you love will end up the same as your beloved Gluskin, who is now a sniveling wreck not even worth cutting up and feeding to the other lunatics. So stay put. Behave. And I will be there very soon.”  
“I... I understand.”  
“Good girl.” He hangs up. My legs cave underneath me and I shudder on the floor, clutching at my own face, my mouth, trying to close it and stop the sobs tearing from my chest.  
“He's going to kill us.”  
Jess looks up from where she stands by the settee, her chest heaving, eyes wide as a deer in headlights.  
“There's nothing we can do.” I say. “He knows, about it all.”  
Her face visibly crumbles as any shred of hope vanishes from her face. “Even if we didn't call her, they must have already known. They were just waiting for the right moment.” I say, and she comes and sits next to me.  
“We can get out of this.”  
“How?”  
“I don't know!” She snaps. “But something will come up.” 

 

We wait, sitting on the floor together, but nothing does come up. The clouds group together overhead and batter the windows with sheet after successive sheet of rain, and my face is in her plaid shirt, closing my eyes, trying not to envision the muzzles of assault rifles, trying not to do the math inside my head – if there was two for the laboratory door, without Blair in the building, how many would he bring with him? An armoured truck? A police van? Maybe we should call the police. Maybe. But it's too late now, we've broken the law ourselves. We've placed our feet over that invisible line, and somehow I feel that everything that will follow will go unseen by the authorities. As tragedies do.  
“Joan.” She breaks the sound of the sleet on the glass. Her arm curls around my shoulder, the back of my neck. She's warm and smelling of cologne and our washing detergent. “You'll stay with me, right? Even if they try to - to take us apart, you'll stay with me?”  
“Of course.” I reply, my voice gruff, hoarse from disuse. The cat has gone somewhere – I heard the cat-flap go a little while ago, but I was too paralysed by fear to check that she was outside in the yard, safe. “I'm not letting you go.” I say, and she grabs my hand. Something wet lands on my cheek. Like the rain was so hard it somehow got inside. The saltiness sits on my top lip and then drops onto my tongue as if we were two funereal statues, two stone gargoyles left exposed to the elements. Each car that I hear drive past spears my chest with new fear, until I can scarcely breathe.  
“Calm down.” She says. No 'it's going to be fine', because we know it's not going to be fine.  
“I think I'm going to be sick.” I murmur.  
“Not on your mother's carpet. She wouldn't thank you for that.” She tries to laugh, but the sound dies in her throat. Then the sound of someone pulling up on the drive, and I choke on my own breathing. Jess's fingers curl so tight into my hair that it hurts. The engine stops and then a pause that lasts a lifetime. Her eyes are on the carpet. So are mine. We wait and we try to breathe, and then a knock at the door.  
“I'll answer it.” I say in a strange moment of clarity, making myself stand up. She takes a moment to move, then rises to her feet as well. “If we don't open it, they'll just break it down.”  
She nods, grabs my hand, and we both round into the hallway, staring towards the door. Behind the frosted glass is the silhouette of a dark-haired man in a suit, and I move forwards tentatively, trying to think my way out of the paralytic terror. I open the door and then a barrage of armed figures, men in visors and goggles, rubber gloves and rifles with sound suppressors, barge inside.  
“A light anaesthetic for the two of them should do it.” The ringleader – Blair, I recognise the voice – says, and a fist comes into catastrophic contact with my temple, knocking me to the floor so that I feel my insides have slipped right out of my body.

A mirage of grey and blue. The rain drags itself down my shoulders like cold fingers. Black knapsack over my eyes, sticking to my mouth with rain and tears. Thrown into the back of a vehicle that smells like rusted metal. Driving - no, careering - up a steep incline, parking, being slammed against the inside walls of the truck, then dragged out like a sack of meat. Drawn out on a table. A prick of light working its way through my eyelashes, then something prying my eyes open like peeling the skin off fruit. Words tippling from my lips like animal sounds. Jess is screaming. Then Jess isn't screaming, she's making no sense at all, as if I'm pushed underwater and she's gurgling fat bubbles to the skin of the ocean. Needles in my veins, lamplight in eyes, a succession of ink blots on a succession of papers held in front of me. A picture of my mother. 'Tell me what you saw, tell me what you saw', over and over until I fall asleep underneath a man's face lit by white light.  
“Tell me what you saw,” he says.  
“Nothing.” It's wrong, I'm lying. “I saw nothing.”  
Then she's screaming again, she's lashing out somewhere next to me, crying for her older brother Noah, and I push against restraints. Wrists, ankles, belly, throat. Leather strap fixing my jugular down on the table like a choker, like preparation for a guillotine. Room smells of soup. Blood underneath my fingernails. Black and white checkerboard floor smeared with my own blood. Tell them everything, until Blair's face is my face and the table is my mind laid out, vivisectioned with thick arteries of thought pulsing wet and red. A voice that sounds like me makes pleas. Don't hurt my mother. Don't touch my sister. I'll tell you everything, and then, after my arms are bitten with pinpricks like the insects have eaten me, like a tally marking up the passing days, I say, “Make me forget.” Make me forget everything. I don't want to live. I don't want to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't originally plan for Jess to go into the asylum, but she's such a fun character to write that I couldn't leave her behind. Had a ton of fun writing the drugged-up final passage - expect more like that!  
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She escapes the Engine and runs into a certain someone.
> 
> (TW for graphic descriptions of gore and strong language)

The black and white marry inside my mind, folded out like a canvas, like a universal bedspread, mingling their different tones like wet ink. Like sex. Like fluid. I'm encased in sleep and tugging at the edges of thought – am I being born? Did I ever live? I recall some memories, or perhaps they're dreams. I remember fishes in a cylindrical tank, dark blue and green, the silver shapes of shoals with their scintillating colour. The light dancing off rutilated scales. I hum bubbles into the green bed of water around me, the tube in my throat keeping me quiet, keeping me non-thinking. A dormant entity. I wonder briefly in I'm in a coma, then I remember blue eyes and something smacking its dark shape against a glass pane. The glass begins to fissure and the man is screaming for me from the other side of the water, but I can't see past my dreams of fishes. The big tank with its blackness surrounding it. A dream I had since I was small, perhaps based on a memory.  
Another noise, one in a long succession of noises all getting louder, makes me focus my eyes for the first time in my life. Or so it feels. I raise my head, and my neck shudders with the effort. I see shapes moving past the fluid, and I don't want to see this. Take me back to the fishes and my dreams of a stroller from childhood, my mother holding my hand and helping me walk.   
A siren sounds somewhere, and I can't push reality away. I surface from thought as something hits the dome around me, and the visor through which I see begins to fracture like a bone. If it breaks, it'll kill me – I can't let it break, I need this fluid, I'll die without it -   
The glass – my world – splits open like a great egg and I fall to the ground, the tubes lurching in my throat, still knotted to the inside of the dome so I'm momentarily strung up, puppet-like and anaemic-white, by the wires. Pain rends my insides with its clawed hands. I'm spluttering up blood congealed with the green fluid, and the warmth of it seeps away around me, my ears open up to crashing sound and I scream. This is wrong. I don't belong here. I want to be back inside -  
The tubes inside my nose and throat break free and I flop on the cold, corrugated iron floor like a landed fish, all the while bawling, terrified by the light and colour and deafening noise. I'm in a laboratory. A large screen before my face shows black and white shapes like ink blots, photographs of lizards, of animals fucking, of somebody being shot at point blank so that their face ruptures into red. I make myself move, wriggling lamely, rolling onto my back.   
I smell smoke, and in my peripheral there is the roaring body of fire climbing the walls beyond a glass pane. Something inside me jolts. Figures rush past me in hospital gowns, some in uniforms, holding assault rifles and being wrestled to the ground by the angry, frantic men in hospital clothes. The glass wall, and beyond it the rows upon rows of computers. A memory slips in and out of focus and then I remember with a rushing surge of horror my age, my gender, I remember my name. The smell of my hair when I don't wash it for a week. My voice reading from a page, the look of my fingers, looking into the window of the hospital on my way into the building, wearing painful formal shoes, looking at my own pale face, red hair, green eyes. A figure rushes to the glass and cries for me for save them.   
Now I'm on the other side of the glass, curled foetal underneath the spherical machine I once saw being used.   
The fire rises higher and I drag myself to my feet.   
“Come on! Come on, we can go!” Somebody wrenches me into a run, grabbing me by the upper arm, and I whirl around to see a man with a shaved head and sallow cheeks. Scar tissue mottles his right eye and drags down the lower waterline – one of his pupils is blown wide and black, the other pinprick small. I stagger alongside him, past the rising fire, and I look to see the silhouette of another person throwing computers and apparatus into the blaze, screaming with spittle lacing the corners of his mouth. The rabble with their shaved heads or matted hair, some wet and covered in fluid. I look around wildly, back to the spheres, and I remember Jess, somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory. Thinking of her brings to mind the cold sensation of anaesthesia in my wrists and arms, the stench of cleaning alcohol and rubber, the monotonous beep of a monitor. Where is she?  
“Have you seen-” I grab the scarred man and attempt to speak, but the words are garbled, only partly intelligible. “Have you seen a girl – dark hair – brown eyes?”   
“What?” He doesn't understand, just drags me after him, through an open doorway, into a network of corridors walled by transparent plastic, like a quarantine zone. There's a red alarm mounted on the wall and shafts of red light wash over eyes, searing my eyes, the scream of the alarm blotting out the sounds of guards being overpowered, bullets being loosed in the other room. Everything has a dour grey hue, and this person with his delineated face and jutting cheekbones, and he tugs me onwards, round a corner and leads us into a room walled by the plastic. There's several white suits with yellow gas masks folded into neat piles on a desk in the corner, and in the centre of the room is a padded wheelchair with a man in uniform tied down. He trashes and screams, and two other patients grip him fast, prevent him from lunging to kill us all.  
“You psychos – you fucking psychos, you'll burn in hell! I'll kill you and drag you down to hell and then kill you again!” His dark blue uniform is black in places, glistening damp with blood in the stark, white light. I can hardly stand, feel weak, and I seize the desk for support. The guard's cheeks burn puce with rage and he spits at me. I don't react when his spittle wets my arm. I don't even move. My scarred escort seizes a fire extinguisher from the wall and braces it over his head.  
“Hell, huh? We're going to go to hell?” He screams. “I'll see you there!”   
He brings the canister down onto the man's face, and he scarcely has time to make a noise. His right temple is depressed, the skull fracturing into pieces under the skin, blotted and bruising and purplish. His eye socket is impacted and the lid droops shut like that of a broken doll's. I'm heaving and trying not to collapse, shocked by the brutality of the scene. The eyeball, the slit of it that is visible, is red as blood from where the force probably burst every vessel. Like denting the side of a car. He's still alive, his other eye crazily flitting from figure to figure, his mouth dragged down on the left side, and perhaps one hemisphere of his brain is shutting down from the blow, making it so he has no control over the left half of his body. I watch with wide eyes as he spasms in his final moments of life, jerking like a dying spider, then falling still with his bloody mouth ajar and his head partially deflated. The air leaks out of him in a whine. The scarred man holding the fire extinguisher turns and holds it out to me, and my stomach flips inside my body like water in a washing machine. I turn and I run, ripping through the plastic doors and out of the fire exit, into a darker network of corridors, the arteries of the asylum itself.

Each corridors blurs into the next, and I'm assaulted by the stench of mildew, of something rotting, and my mind flashes with images of Jess's face. I call out for her as I walk the grimy halls, the guttering lights in the ceiling becoming less and less so, and the wail of the sirens and jubilant screams of the escaped patients diminish to a quiet rumble. My own footsteps slap on the thin veneer of wet that makes the ground slick. I'm assaulted by a feeling, and it grips me, nostalgia crawling under my skin. I remember one of my first sports days at middle school, begrudgingly getting into the outfit of polyester shirt and shorts and sinking down into the passenger seat next to my mother. My mother drove me up the road to the school and I did what I did every sports day, which is look out the car window to see other people wearing their kit. Just to make sure I got the right day. I remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw everyone in their normal uniform, and I had clearly got the day wrong, and I curled myself into a ball in my seat and my mother grumbled something like, “Why is it always you?” Now I ask myself this question.   
I turn a corner into a better-lit corridor, pervaded with the smell of rancid meat, and I clap a hand over my mouth in disgust as flies ghost in the air, humming happily, nuzzling their way into the semi-decomposed body of a man with his mouth ripped into a wide grimace. His teeth are partially gone. The insects devour him, and I nearly collapse against the wall. Tears sting my eyes, and then something catches my attention, the silhouette of a man at the very end of the corridor, someone with a sinewy body, hunched over another corpse. Tendrils of sopping dark red are being pulled from the bloated stomach of a body, and the man is guzzling them, his mouth making slapping noises. I realise that he is delicately holding a knife between his fingers and with his other hand he is eating the corpse. Between he and I, suspended from a meat hook, is something I recognise. It's a flat ballet pump from my own wardrobe, the one that I left in this building not so long ago. The nausea overcomes me and I lurch, staggering into a science lab to the right, shaking as I collapse to my knees and vomit up greenish fluid. I recognise it as the surrogate I lived in the pod, the fluid that is still coating my body and, I only now notice, the beige one-piece uniform I'm wearing. It has a zipper along the front that reminds me of the split-belly corpses, and I rock with nausea on the floor again.   
I fixedly stare at my “formal” shoe suspended from the meat hook for a while, and the nausea still doesn't subside. I can hear the sound of the cannibal slinking away into the darkness, beyond the smashed-in windows of this corridor with its boarded-up doors. Nearby is a semi-rotted plank of wood that I grab and tell myself that if that patient comes over here, I'll be perfectly able to hit him. I can still see the shape of his ribs, the dark leonine hair, from over here, refracted through the broken glass. He stabs his fingers into the mangled corpse that's been dragged out into the hallway, judging by the bloody smear behind it. The smell of the place is almost impossible to describe, because I've never smelt anything so potent, so thick that it rests on my tongue like a lozenge. I hear my pulse thundering in my ears so hard that my chest is actually moving with my heartbeat. I can feel the blood surging through my fingertips, into my cheeks, like it's pushing itself as hard against my skin as it can, so it can leave through my pores, abandon me here like an unwanted dog. I feel like if I have a soul, it's pushing against the walls of my body like a butterfly in a glass jar.  
I slowly get up and my legs hardly support me. I have to move, even though I feel paralysed. It's a case of run and die or stay here and die a little sooner. I slink out into the hallway and disappear into a door to my left, embraced by the hot fug of darkness and the stench of mould. I take out the flashlight and arc the beam about the room, finding it bizarrely barren. There's a set of stairs as if leading down to a basement of sorts, and I follow them silently, breathing soft and shallow through my nose. There's sewing machines, their needle-points glinting sharp as eyes right back at me. I used to be a fashion student – what a mistake that was. I recall sewing the straight stitch for a pocket two millimetres out of line and my teacher making me completely re-do the entire thing. I exhale in a gust that stirs the dust on the machines. I trail a finger over one of them, and they're almost antique – beautiful, in a macabre, fucked-up sort of way. I carve a little picture of an eye with my finger into the grime, but something stops me.   
In the corner of my vision, like when you catch your face in the mirror and don't recognise yourself, is something. Distinctly living, breathing, staring at me from a window. I pointedly refuse to turn around, because it will go away. Like when you think you see a strange black shadow, but it's never there when you turn to face it. It will go away. The dark shape, undulating behind a door, behind a small window at face-height, and I think I can see its bugging white eyes. I continue to the next sewing machine and draw another little eye, but this time my finger shakes and my breathing is shallow. If I know it's going to go away, why can't I turn around?  
Because, some small part of me replies, you know it's not going to go away. This isn't your imagination. This isn't a nightmare. I slowly turn to face it, my skin prickling, my hand leaving the sewing machine, and my heart lurches in my chest. There's a man standing behind the door with a body cast in shadow and two white holes for eyes grinning my way, unblinking, wolfish.  
“Darling?” It says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is well overdue - I've been writing what happens later on and got so caught up in Joan and Eddie's interactions, so I've had to backtrack. There's lots more to come, and hopefully soon. Constructive crit, as always, is welcome. Enjoy!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She gets swept off her feet. Kind of.
> 
> (TW for graphic depictions of gore)

Suddenly my composure cracks and the reality of the situation collapses upon me, and I break into a run, tearing past rows upon rows of toothed machine.   
There's a door at the end of the room, and I fling it open, bolting out into a corridor strewn with ripped white fabric, papers vexed to the walls – I catch sight of them as I run and see clothes designs, some kind of dresses, and the jarring contrast between those drawings and the stench of the basement, the blood on the walls, makes me even more anxious. Turn a corner but find myself completely frozen, looking down upon a mess of mangled limbs, congealed blood, the ruptured sac of a woman's stomach where the body slumps like a bag of potatoes on an operating table. The lifeless eyes and teeth wooly with greenish vomit grimace at me, and my gaze flickers over the figure, to the dismembered head rolled against its bloodied genitalia. The stump of a penis, knots of muscle visible and glinting in the light even from here. My head swims with the image, and I drag myself along the opposite wall, quivering.   
Then there's the sound of measured footsteps, the door I opened creaking on its hinges. The creature following me. I look once more, disgustingly intrigued by the perversity, the wrongness of the scene, to find that the body's thighs are too sinewy to be a woman. Its arms are thick, the wrists and hands lacking the empathic delicacy of a girl's, the mouth small, distinctly male. Someone has sewn lopsided breasts onto the corpse. With that, new panic bleeds into my gut and I run again, lock myself inside a room nearby, pressing my back to the door. I look around, frantic, for a place to hide. Another door within this small room, and then a checkerboard floor with the black and white tiles marred with mess, dirt, blood. There's an old lift with rusted mesh for a door, and I slip inside, jabbing the button fiercely in the hope of another floor. I collapse to the ground as the lift clambers tiredly upwards, relief washing over me. I can't vouch for a lack of stairs, but that will keep the creature off my trail for a while. I hope.  
A jovial ting of the lift as I reach a new floor. I can't lift myself from my hunched, foetal position on the floor. I'm sobbing dry into my jeans and staring blindly at my mauled boots. I bite my own fingers, stuff my mouth with them, to try and get myself to shut up. Just shut up. My hands shake. I try to remember what my therapist always said – take in your environment. Be in the present. I'm not sure I want to, but I make myself look beyond the lift doors, out into this new floor.   
There's flagstone floors with their cracked tiles of chess board black and white. An upturned wheelchair with the dented wheel spinning slowly, turning on its glinting fulcrum like a merry go round, with the cold fluorescent light spilling over it, at the very end of the corridor. This is a bad idea, one of my shittiest ideas actually, I realise with a sinking feeling. I get up and stand in the cone of warm, phosphorent light from the swinging lamp in the elevator shaft. I curl my hands around the metal mesh and realise my palms are sweating and my hands are shaking. There's a door at the end, next to the wheelchair. Between me and this door, there is blood on the walls.   
I force myself to wrench the lift door aside, staggering out into the open, pacing fast along the corridor. The lights flicker, and each time the darkness descends upon me, I see in my imagination eyes glinting in the dark, the flash of white teeth. The laughter of the insane, the pattering footsteps of a fevered mind, someone who has caught the smell of me. Fear crawls along my spine and I walk quicker, breathing hard through my nose, and I'm getting there – I am. I reach it and seize the knob in a spasm of relief, my panic finally washing over me in a torrent as I open the door and slip inside like a little silver shadow.   
The room inside is black and smells of damp. I press myself to the wall. My blood is thundering in my ears and I can feel how my eyes are straining in the dark, blinking to adjust myself, both wanting to see and not wanting to see. After several seconds of panting, of feeling my fingertips quiver against the peeling paint of the wall, I can see I've entered some kind of science lab. Grey on grey are the soft shapes of long tables, taps that look like the long necks of swans bent over small basins, and the gas nozzles that I used to light bunsen burners in school. I feel some comfort in this, some familiarity, but catch the scent of smoke on the air. A phrase flits through my head; where there is smoke, there is -   
I don't finish the thought. Something in the room clatters to the ground and the sound of smashing glass makes me jolt. I bite my lip to silence my heavy breathing and shimmy along the wall, trying to move away from the noise. My eyes search for somewhere to conceal myself, some cabinet or cupboard. I catch sight of a storage compartment, perhaps for keeping science equipment, and deftly move towards it, not pausing to look at the cause of the noise. I don't need to know. I don't want to know. I open the cabinet door with a creak that makes my heart clamour – please don't make noise – before ducking inside, shutting it behind me, to my luck finding it completely empty. My fingers scrabble on the inside of the little doors for some kind of handle for me to hold, and I find a small catch. I cling to it and pull the doors as far shut as I can. Keep them shut. I'll make sure nothing comes inside. Then the realisation of what happened, the sudden noise that could only have been caused by a person, dawns upon me and I think I'm going to vomit.  
A grumble outside in the dark. I feel my throat clot with a dying scream.   
“Darling.” I swear that the word, its drawn-out vowels, linger in the air like the unshakeable feeling after a nightmare. That moment after waking where the demon from your dream could be real, could be hunched right there in the corner of your room. The moment where reality is a blurred figure. “Darling, I know you're there. I can smell you. Did you think I'd forget about you? Oh no. No, no. These games are becoming tiresome. I'd like for you to come out now.”  
And the voice rings within my own ears, because I recognise it, and my heart drops with a sickening feeling like when your stomach flips on a fairground ride. I've walked these flagstone floors and come upon what I sought. How did he get here so fast? He must have taken stairs, or another lift. His voice is deeper than it was when he lunged for the glass, hammering fists against his, his eyes running me through, disassembling me. The footsteps are coming ever closer, and I realise that any moment now he's about to tear open the cupboard door and find me. My heart thunders in my throat, and I can't breathe. Then it happens, the door is pulled open and he's kneeling on the floor in front of me, eyes glinting like those of a cat. I feel like I'm ensconced in a nightmare, like this can't possibly be real. All this preparation, all the courage it took to come here, my own stupidity – somehow, I thought I could change a murderer, fix a maniac. Now I'm going to become one of those news stories you read in the Sunday paper, over your coffee, and you feel your heart truly sink. You despise the human race for five minutes. Then you forget, you dress, you go to work. You forget about it.  
That's what's going to happen.  
Eddie Gluskin's face has been distorted somehow, littered with dark blotches, open wounds, his left eyelid dragged down in a cruel slant. His large hand comes out to rest on my throat, and for a moment the contact with one of the Variants drives me crazy, makes me shake and lash out, spewing all kinds of humiliating pleas.  
“Please – please, don't kill me!” The voice leaving my lips does not even sound like me. He pulls me out of the cupboard by the hair and I'm rolling over onto my back on the ground, staring up in the darkness at the phosphoresce of those eyes, the odour of blood and musk and sex subduing me. Somewhere underneath the stench of filth is a familiar smell of leather and spices, of whiskey, of shaving cream and skin. “I didn't mean to do all this. Don't kill me.”  
His hand still curled into my hair, and his expression is completely unreadable.   
“We've met before, haven't we, darling?” He then says, and the softness of that voice is equally as disturbing as the scene on the operating table, the sewn-on breasts. He speaks with a kind of child-like playfulness, reminding me of how the bodies were arranged in a grotesque pantomime of intimacy. I say nothing, do nothing, simply curled at his feet like a wood-louse. “I recognise that face.”   
He lifts me up by the waist and sets me on my feet, standing less than a meter away, breathing hard and deep, looking at me as if I'm something to be devoured.  
“I was there when they put you in the Morphogenic Engine.” I manage to say.   
“Them – those pig bastards? Those rapists?” He spits, and I back away slightly, but he seizes me by the front of my t-shirt and drags me towards him. I never thought of myself as small, but the width of his shoulders, the way my face is level with his collarbone, makes me realise the true extent of my powerlessness. My fingers grapple with his, trying to pry him off. I claw at his fingerless gloves and he's panting, practically growling, in my face.   
“Did they touch you, darling?” He snarls, and I crane my neck to look at him. I'm a second away from asking what on earth he's talking about, when the realisation suddenly settles on my shoulders that whatever the Morphogenic Engine had done to him, he wasn't being lucid right now. And any wrong word from me could result in my neck being snapped.  
“Y-yes.” It sounds like a question.  
“Why would you let them do that? You – you common whore!” He shoves me away and I stumble, nearly falling to the ground.   
“I didn't want them to! I tried to fight them off, but I couldn't!”   
He's suddenly, devastatingly inconsolable. His blue eyes flash about the room. “I'll – I'll have to rip them all apart – where are they?”  
“Dead. They're dead. I had – I had my friend shoot them. Every single one.” The lies sting on my tongue and I feel sick to my stomach.   
“Darling, it's been too long, I-” His voice shudders, and he seems calmer, although his hands still agitate at his sides. “-I've missed you. I've missed you every day you've been gone.”  
In some moment of utter madness, I grab his hand and squeeze the fingers. He looks at me as if I'm a deity, some kind of God, and it's wildly disconcerting.   
“It's okay. I'm back, now. I'm not going to leave again.”   
His mouth falters into a smile and he seizes me, wrapping arms around my waist, dragging me flush against his chest, his hips. The smell of him envelops me and I feel subsumed, asphyxiated, letting my body go limp. I clutch his shirt and, after a while, I stop shaking, but a feeling of complete repulsion at myself settles in my stomach like a stone. He breathes heavy with his mouth pressed against my hair before he says, “I've been waiting to consummate our love.” His voice shakes with excitement, and the bile rises in my throat. This is all wrong, I can't lie out of this one, I can't-  
“You must have been waiting – how long has it been? Years. It feels like years.” His hands are shifting from my shoulders to my waist and my breathing hitches, a small noise of terror escaping my mouth. Despite the rancid odour clinging to the wallpaper of every hall in this building, despite the barred windows and the impenetrable dark outside, I find my body shuddering with excitement at the touch of this deranged person.   
“Wait-” I choke, but his hands don't stop, his fingers finding the hem of my t-shirt and curling underneath. He exhales in a breathy sigh, and I glance up to see his eyes glazed over, rheumy blue, not seeing me at all, but imagining someone else he must have loved. “Stop it.” I say, suddenly gathering strength. He gazes down at me and his eyes burn. “I'm not ready.”   
He looks at me as if taking a moment to process these words before nodding slowly. “Of course not, darling. Of course. It takes a woman some time to know what she wants – we, well, we have a lot of work to do. We have to strip away everything... vulgar.” His lip twists with derision at the word, and he visibly stiffens. “Come on.” He breathes, suddenly hooking an arm behind my knees and picking me up, holding me to his chest with disconcerting ease. Then his hand appears once more before my face, holding something grey, cloth-like, smelling so acrid that it makes my eyes water. He's going to knock me out cold, dismember me like the corpses I saw. Panic overrides my confusion, the heat between my legs, and I lash out violently, shoving him away, becoming rigid in his arms. I'm spitting profanities and his eyes are almost glowing in the soft dark and the cloth, the cloying stench, is moving ever closer. I kick outwards and fall from his arms, finding the floor with a head-thumping sound and scrabbling for an escape. I find only the wall, which he pins me against, looming over me, pressing the cloth to my mouth until I'm sucked into blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love writing Eddie's character - there's a fine line between gentleness and violence and I feel that he can switch between the two very quickly, and it makes him really interesting. I feel like I honestly don't know what he's going to do next. 
> 
> Kidnap is such an Outlast fandom trope so I apologise, but I promise there'll be no more cliches. ;)
> 
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He murders her.

The morning-light comes in soft through the curtains, and I shift naked underneath the covers, feeling the summer glow of gold working its way over the windowsill, across the floor, making shadows over my art supplies, his shirts, all our things. His leg between two of mine, and my mouth resting in the warm hollow of his neck. He murmurs in his sleep and I touch the soft, brown hair, winding fingers against his temples, and I rock my hips against him, eliciting from his lips the best noise I've ever woken up to hearing. Opens his dark eyes groggily and sees me there, and there's such a look of happiness that it breaks my heart. Then he's gone from the bed and his leg is just the crumpled bedcovers. My nudity is replaced by a crumpled one-piece. The warmth of his body isn't there, because he left for another country. Because relationships just don't last in university, amongst the workload and the stress and the pressing weight of self-sufficiency. No more brown eyes, brown hair, brown distressed leather jacket.   
The mattress is no longer my mattress, and I blearily open one eye a slit into grey squalor, attempting to worm my way out of the sinking feeling of loneliness in my stomach and instead falling into a world of even more catastrophic disarray. As if someone painted the wall with my insides. Okay, perhaps not quite that. I'm not that fucking sad, he was just a guy and it was just an ordinary relationship with an ordinary break-up. My mother always said that when you're young relationships are just like atoms bumping into each other by accident. I sometimes wonder when my relationships will stop being accidents and I'll discover something worth running after, worth making a decision for. I'm about to take this thought further when, through the evaporating fog of unconsciousness, I take note of what the grey squalor exactly is. Answer: the serrated edge of a rotating hacksaw, stilled in its hungry destruction of a makeshift operating table.   
The light through a window to my right, one of the only other things in this room that is not still unintelligibly blurred, winks off the merciless edge of the blade. I crane my neck to the window and there, beyond the silhouetted roof of the church with its crucifix, is the bloodied light of dawn. The rest of the room swirls into focus, and I see beyond the operating table with its saw the metal frame of a bed with a thin mattress, and atop this is my kidnapper, shoulders hunched, his back to me. My heart nearly jumps out of my mouth, and I curl into a tight ball on the bed. There's a thin blanket drawn over me, and my eyes flit to him once more, the only one who could have done it. He's unfolding his shirt and the moment is so crisp in its quietude, like untouched snow, that I scarcely want to breathe for fear I would spoil it. He puts his gloves on first, with the reverence of someone washing their feet at a mosque, and I see the light illuminating scars upon his shoulders, carving down his spine. He has muscle like the marble statues of Michaelangelo that pinioned my childhood spent in art museums. Michaelangelo took the slab of marble and saw the angel inside it. He brought them to life like reanimating the dead. Gluskin could be one such angel, carved in a rudimentary way by an anxious hand. He could be a statue from ancient Athens, weathered by time and drowned in all the oceans and then dragged back up again when people wanted to remember what real beauty looked like.   
Put on a pedestal. Stared at. Put in an asylum. Stared at.  
He shrugs into his shirt in a fluid motion and its as if the hypnotist has snapped his fingers over my eyes and time begins again. The birds sing outside, several crows caw. He hums quietly to himself and then he looks over his shoulder, and he sees me staring with the wide eyes of a tourist. I expect him to say something, but he does not, merely stands up and faces me, buttons his shirt to the top. Then he looks away and goes about his business as if I'm not here, putting on the bow tie, the waistcoat, and all the while the hacksaw is dormant and glittering in front of him and the two images are oxymoronic.   
“Gluskin.” I mumble, because the moment has become too heavy.   
“Hmm?” He turns to look at me, puts his hands in his pockets. His gaze is lazy and blue, head cocked slightly to one side.   
I hadn't actually intended to say anything else, and now I feel put on the spot. Shit. Better try and sound smart. “Can I go home now?” Silence, and my cheeks feel molten. Not smart.  
I'm going to die here.   
But he laughs, the scar tissue around his eyes crinkling, and the sound is slightly out of tune, as if each word he says is played in a minor key.  
“You are home.” He replies. He opens his mouth to say something else, but my stomach decides that what it has to say is far more important. The resonant grumble sounds like a beached whale and echoes across the room.   
“What was that?” He looks somewhere between disgusted and deeply concerned.  
“Nothing-”  
“Are you in pain?”  
“No, no-”  
But he actually hurries across the room and kneels by the bed. He puts his hand on my stomach and I visibly start, taking his hand and pushing it away, then he gasps and says, “You're having contractions, aren't you?”  
“What?”  
“The baby, it's – it's-”   
“I'm not pregnant!” I retort with force, sitting up and scooting as far away as I can. He blinks once or twice and then it's as if lucidity overwhelms him once more, and he nods.  
“Of course not. No. Forgive me, I got a little... over-zealous.” The silence falls over the room once more and I know that I have to get out, I have to leave, before he murders me.   
“Look, Gluskin, I really have to leave.” I say, dread sinking in my stomach, but the guilt that this might have been partially my fault makes me want to try and get out the honest way first. “I came here because I wanted to repent for what I did. Well, I was going to come here, before Blaire made it impossible to refuse. He blackmailed my friend and I into handing ourselves in.”   
He looks up at me as if trying to figure me out. His gaze undulates between confusion and potential rage.   
“I was there when they put you in the Morphogenic Engine – that's why you recognise me. Not because we're engaged, or because we're in love, or even because you know me. I'm probably embedded in your brain somewhere purely because I was one of the last faces you saw before they put you in the Engine. That's all. But, if you want, you can come with me and get the hell out of here. You can get help, get sorted out.” I take a deep breath and prepare myself to run, if that's what I have to do. His face is terrifyingly blank, I can't anticipate how this will turn out. “I thought I could help you, but I don't know if I can. None of this has turned out how I planned it... Do you want to get out?”   
He doesn't answer. “I can't leave - I haven't found the right girl yet.” He says after a moment or two, his lips parted, the sores looking wet in the slats of daylight thrown into the room. “I have to – I have so many things to do-” Then he starts shaking where he kneels on the ground.  
“You can help me find my friend and leave.” I murmur, the words lingering on my mouth. His hand curls into the frame of the bed, and he glowers at me with such animation, his blue eyes swimming in their red, that I inhale as if burnt.   
“I'm not leaving. Neither are you.” He says resolutely, seizing me by the arm and dragging me upright. “We must have the ceremony – you need to get ready. This way.” He begins to steer me toward the operating table, the saw, and I seize the frame of the bed where it's nailed to the ground, pulling away, but he's relentless.   
“You're not putting me on there.” I snarl, suddenly lit up by fury, the peace from the moment before completely gone.  
“You – whore! You whore, you're just like the rest of them!” He bellows, lifting me by the hips and wrestling me onto the surface of the operating table with its thin layer of grime. The word stirs hatred in my gut and I kick out, lashing for his solar plexus, wanting to bludgeon him with the sole of my boot, grind his cheek into the floor – but I can't continue thinking like this, the thought makes me sick, and then I give a cry for help, I try to push him off one last time. I will not see myself reduced to this. To a monster.  
“I'm not a whore!” The words shake, and his hands are clamping around my wrists, lashing them with cable ties to wooden struts flanking the table, like a crude cot, like a child playing at being surgeon. He doesn't know what he's doing. I came here to save him, so why is this happening? I try to yank my arms down but my arms are over my head, I'm incapacitated, and then he seizes my legs and it's as if someone lights a fuse inside me. I know the strength of my own legs and I buck fiercely against the table, making the struts creak and the entire thing shift on the ground. He looks momentarily afraid, and then my boot strikes him in the jaw.  
“Darling – darling, why are you doing this?”  
“I'm not your darling!” I spit. He snarls and seizes my right leg, twists it violently outwards so that the knee gives a crackle and pop, threatening to dislocate, and I squirm helplessly within the agony, nausea writhing in my stomach. I find myself weakening, and then in what feels like scarcely a moment both my legs are wrenched open and my ankles bound to either side of the table – the hacksaw is delicately poised at the end of the table, between my legs. My head fogs and black fringes my vision, and I nearly lose consciousness at the realisation of what is going to happen. Split open from the bottom upwards.   
“I came here to save you!” I wail, and the words fill the room. He stills for a moment, his chest heaving, to listen. “I didn't want any of this to happen, but it did – I thought I could help you, but this was a waste of time, and now... now, I'm going to die here. For what? For some misplaced sense of righteousness. I'm not your darling, I'm not your whore. I'm not whatever person you think I am – you can't erase what people have done to you by erasing everybody else in the world. The things that hurt you are what you have to live with.” The drivel spilling from me is endless, and he has his head cocked, lips slightly ajar, a predator entranced by the manic desperation of its prey. Then the rage bites into me, and I see in my mind's eye the face of the cannibal, the way he played with a dead body like sand running through his fingers, like he was pushing canals in the sand for the sea-water to flow into, not swilling blood on his fingertip. “Go on then, kill me! Do it!” The animal voice isn't me. I trash on the table and my eyes are riveted to his, and I can hear the sound of my own breathing like cloth rending. As if every part of me wants to exit the world screaming. We are born screaming, we should die screaming. Symmetry.  
“You'd rather die than be with me?” He says, lip twisting. Hurt dances in his eyes.  
“The more people you slaughter, the more they win. The ones who hurt you. This means they win.” I say with sudden quietude, sudden acceptance. His hand rests on the blade, on a metal notch next to it, which will wrench free the spanner he's got jammed next to the blade, holding it still. One push of the lever and the blade will roar into life, will split the table, will lacerate me. “They would have wanted you to do this.”  
“You know nothing about it, you impotent slut!” Black tendrils of hair fall over his brow, and he leans over the table, face disappearing from view, shadow catching in his creased forehead like water in ridged earth. The blue eyes burn phosphorent still. Anger makes my tongue lurch to spout expletives, foul words, but I choke them back.  
“You call me a slut because they called you a slut, when they raped you. Somebody did.” I say. “Isn't that right?” Nothing. No sound. I am so ready for the hacksaw to come alive, to spring like a predator from its tortured sleep. “Nobody is a slut here. Not me, not you.”  
His shoulders are shaking. The broad line quivers and underneath his taught shirt I see the deltoids rippling, like there's another person living inside his skin trying to writhe its way out. His breathing comes hard and fast, and his brow creases ever deeper. He's having some kind of panic attack.   
“You're not a slut.” I say, and he gives a snarl of anguish. The sound of metal on wood fills my ears and I feel as if my innards are trying to crawl upwards, my very being to force itself out of my shell and leap through the window, sprint far away from here. I'm vaguely aware that I'm screaming, my vision is blotted by terror, my mind is racing to accommodate the amount of pain I'm seconds away from enduring, trying to prepare myself for the inevitable. I writhe as far away from the saw as I can, but it snarls closer, at a quicker rate that I imagined, a whirling mass of serrated white winking in the sun. He's watching me, eyes bolted to my face, breathing hard and fast through his nostrils, as if searching inside me for something, an experimental look like someone trying to see how much they can bend a ruler before it snaps. I hold that gaze not because it's the last thing I want to see before I die, but because somewhere in my mind I feel that it's a fitting end.   
He died a death of sorts in that machine, and I was forced to watch. If he's going to kill me, he owes me his attention. I'm going to haunt him like he's haunted me. Symmetry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never meant for Eddie to do this but, like I've said before, he's an unpredictable character. He might kill her, he might not. Who knows? 
> 
> Constructive crit always welcome. I had so much (sick and morally bankrupt) fun writing this chapter. Enjoy!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She meets a few of his ex-lovers.
> 
> (Warnings for explicit language)

I don't know what I do, what my eyes are saying, but somewhere behind the screaming he moves and the saw stops rotating. I can feel the edge of the blade snagging in the crotch of my jeans, scarcely inches away from my body, and I nearly sob with released tension. I'm shaking violently on the table, and he simply watches me for a moment, eyes glistening, then he disappears from the room in one quick, furtive movement, the door slamming shut behind him. Silence. I roll my head back against the table and find my face completely covered with tears, streaming out and pooling around my temples, wetting my hair, as if my body holds an unlimited supply. I make no sound except a strangled sigh like a death rattle, and it takes me a long time before I can even gather my thoughts sufficiently to work my wrists free of the cable ties.  
The morning continues brightening as if life turned its face away from this building and its contents, and beyond the roof of the church with its crucifix, that I watch upside-down as I arch my neck on the table, I realise that if there is a God, he does very little. These places should not exist. The tears escaping from me, my arms outstretched, facing the dawn, I feel like I've just been baptised. I've no idea why this comes to mind, because I've never been baptised. I force myself upwards, clinging to the struts for support, working my wrists free by twisting them left and right out of the cable tie leaving savage indentations in my flesh, pink and scar-tissue white. The blood rushes back to my fingers and I clumsily free my ankles. The hacksaw is still between my legs. I feel my stomach churning suddenly and bile rises in my throat. My entire body clenches and I vomit in acidic tendrils over the side of the table, pattering to the floor. The fist of my stomach spasmodically tenses, relaxes, tenses again until my eyes are watering and then I'm empty, hunched over and spent, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. I don't care if he'll be angry about the vomit on the floor. He deserves as much. Then I notice what looks like two severed fingers next to my stomach acid and realise that he probably won't mind, considering his current stance on housekeeping.  
I shakily lift myself off the table and become enveloped in the events that just elapsed – I was lying there, I was about to be made into two. Like the Damien Hurst piece of the cow cut in half and suspended in formaldehyde, in two separate class cases, so you could walk between them and see the details of its insides.  
I hunch over again and splutter up some saliva and bile, then turn away and try not to think of such gross things. The rage returns and I look around for something to destroy things with, staggering towards a hefty mallet cloaked in rust. I lift it up with both arms, quivering, and heave myself back to the table, taking a swing for the hacksaw and instead only leaving a dent in the metal table, the resounding clang of my anger bouncing off the walls. What if he comes back because of the noise? What if he kills me then? I grit my teeth and I decide I don't care, he can come back and kill me, but he won't be using the goddamned hacksaw. I land a weighty blow on the instrument and its serrated blade folds and buckles, and then again and again I ferociously ruin the apparatus. I'm making grunts and snarls and cussing feverishly, blinking through tears and just trying to wrench the fucking thing of the hinges of its machinery.  
“Fuck you!” I bellow, and the saw spins off into the corner of the room, a tangled mess of tarnished silver. I race to it and stamp on it, jump on it, until it resembles a destroyed metal sheet, not a multi-toothed weapon. “You - fucking – stupid – thing!” It splits in half and the two fractals spin on the ground, glinting in the sun. I stand there, wielding the mallet, then wrestle the door open and race out into the corridor.  
There are glass cabinets lining the walls, holding trophies and little award plaques for patient care, for "superior hygiene standards". Perhaps it's the near-destruction-of-my-vagina experience talking, but I swing the hammer and obliterate the glass for good measure, leaving the awards in chewed-up glassy remnants on the floor. I look down at the wreckage and emotion overcomes me, swelling in my chest like a black balloon.  
This building, its smell, its people, is changing me.  
I want to curl into a ball on the floor and close my eyes, wish myself back home, but that's a ridiculous thing to do. I know now that to do so would leave me vulnerable, so I continue onwards, striking out my own path. I come across a door to the very end of the corridor, the only door not boarded up or mangled beyond any state of rescue. I glance in through the window in the door, the criss-cross of metal mesh, and peer in at a gymnasium bathed in light, the sun spilling itself over the brim of the high windows, illuminating the lines of a basketball court, the two hoops at either end of the room. The hoops have been torn in places, shreds of netting grey and stagnant as spider webs, collecting light. Tiny dust particles like glowing embers are thrown into bright gold light, and I crane my neck to see what I first think looks like a brood of abnormally large bats hanging from the ceiling. It wouldn't surprise me, somehow. I notice a male figure hunched on the ground, face propped on his knees, and I recognise the black hair and whorled, scarred cheek of Gluskin. My stomach flips and my palms begin to sweat, and I kneel down, watching the scene through the keyhole, now. His shoulders shudder and he looks small inside the sprawling room, and he's surrounded by what look like articles of dirty clothing. Except they're not. They're veined tubes taking on a pink sheen, most likely intestines, like a torn-down party banner, bathed in congealed red and brown. There are some severed arms only a metre or so away from where my captor kneels, and he sits down on the dirty floor, his hands over his face. The mallet practically itches in my hands, and I could do it now, I realise. I could kill him. And then what? What would I have come here for? I remember reclining with the cat, looking out over the summer yard, when I decided I was coming back, to save these patients. But they're not patients, I think to myself. The only patients here are Jess and I – these men, the Variants, are not patients. He would have murdered me, this man that has so occupied my mind. Perhaps taking this mallet and killing him would be a small mercy.  
He looks up and I follow his gaze to the rafters, and what I thought looked like bats are not bats. They are people, strung up by ropes around throats or tied-together ankles, hanging from the ceiling like meat strung out to dry. How many? Innumerable figures, all blurred together into one black shadow, looming over the pale man in the light, like a monster about to unpeel itself from the ceiling and completely consume him. I squint to look closer and Gluskin's face is wet, his mouth contorted, and I can hear the sobbing as he watches the corpses in their terrifying sleep, so still that they look ready to become re-animated at any moment. Empathy flashes through me but I stifle it. I hold the mallet in both hands and I ready myself to ease the door open, and if it creaks or gives me away, I'll simply crawl on hands and knees and hide myself in a locker until he forgets the sound ever happened. And if it doesn't creak, I resolve that I'll slink across the bloodied floor, and then I will have to murder him, before he murders me. But he's talking to the corpses now, sobbing, and it makes me freeze.  
“I did what I was told to do – what more could I do? I had to make them perfect. They weren't perfect yet, any of them. Will I ever find the right one? One who looks enough like mother? I have to find her and kill her, I don't have a choice-”  
He's rambling, and I decide that this is the moment, I'll have to do it now, before he falls silent and then he'll hear my footfalls. I gently open the door and it swings silently on its hinges, and I ease myself inside, keeping close to the wall of the gymnasium. My heart thunders in my mouth, and the dust particles swirl in their clouds of molten gold, a halo around his shoulders and head, his ears tinted pink as the sun bleeds through them. I can almost see the tiny red veins in the shell of his ears. My senses are so piqued I feel electrified. One more step, and then something happens, something makes a noise – a badminton shuttlecock makes a puck puck noise as it falls to the floor from a rolled-back net behind me, the kind they unravel for games of tennis. The shuttlecock bounces by my left foot and my stomach falls right through me, and as I look up, I see him look over his shoulder, the sobbing brought to an abrupt stop. He sees me. His blue eye is bleached by the sunlight, and I can see tiny bands of cobalt and grey and his shrunken pupil, the burst blood vessels and the relaxed line of his mouth. Like a handsome piece of furniture that's been distressed.  
“You.” He says, choking on the word. His cheek glistens wet. I contemplate raising the mallet above my head and running for him, to crack his skull into fractured tectonic plates of bone, but I find myself unable to move. “You don't look like her.” He nearly sighs. “It wouldn't work if I killed you. You were right, it wouldn't... it wouldn't fix anything.”  
I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. No words from me will save my life.  
“Look at you. I remember your face as if it happened yesterday – you must have been there, before I woke up. Though I don't feel awake right now. With you here, it's like I'm in a dream again. The light is making the edges of your head look bright red. Blood red. Like a halo. Like you're painted by Rubens. You're not the sacrificial lamb I need, you're something else.” He turns away from me and looks up to the rafters again, and it's only now that I allow myself to breathe deep, and the stench of the rotting carcasses hits me. My blood thunders around my body, my hands practically pulsate with it. My palm is so slick I nearly drop the mallet, which he hasn't seen. I gently lower it to the ground. He seems in a state that I can reason with.  
“Did you...” As soon as I utter a single sound, his head snaps back round to me again, his lips parted. He drinks in the sight of me. “Did you kill them all?”  
“Yes.” He says simply. “I need to find the right one. Mother, she... she wouldn't die, so I need to find her again, to make her apologise for what she did. What she let them do to me.”  
Silence, and I don't know what to say for a second. I feel compelled to talk, my tongue itching to go, because I can't let him sit and think – if I do that, he'll remember his lust to murder me.  
“I like Rubens.” I say quietly. “He's one of my favourites.” Shall I pick up the mallet, again, and edge towards him? Shall I move close enough to land a blow? “You're not wrong about the way he uses red. It was his most preferred colour to use, I think. That's because in the baroque period, red pigment was easier to find than other colours, like blue or purple. It was cheap.” My voice echoes on the walls. Somewhere in the room, blood drips to the floor like an old tap.  
“You know Rubens?” His shaky voice lifts with pleasure, and his scarred mouth twitches into a smile. “No one talks about art, here. Not even the doctors did. Certainly not any of them. No art. Just...screaming.” He glances to the corpses, and I follow his gaze, swallowing my fear. The mallet is in my hand, and I sit on the floor and scoot a little closer, keeping it behind my back. I'm sweating buckets. The light plays off his face, and he looks handsome like this, turning his lesser-scarred profile towards me. “They were insolent, drab little sluts. Didn't – didn't appreciate all the things I did for them, all the work I put in to make them beautiful-” The snarl returns to his voice, and his bottom lip twitches, so he bites it between his teeth. Better change the subject.  
“I've seen a Rubens in person.” I say, and he looks at me.  
“You have? How did it feel?” He replies, immediate, wide-eyed. No one asks questions like that. The feel.  
“I... I don't know how it felt. I remember – it was Samson and Delilah. I was on holiday and we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see it. It was at the very end of a dark hall with burgundy walls and leather sofas, and it was huge. Samson, his back, it was bigger than my body. You could nearly feel the weight of him where he was lying on Delilah. I could see every brushstroke, and the contours and the shading on the back muscles was the best part. I felt...” He's watching me so intently, I'm inching closer. He's within arms length, and I can feel myself quivering, can see myself bringing the mallet down upon his skull. “Like I was in a different time. Like I was there watching Rubens paint it.” The mallet slips from my fingers, and I let it silently fall on its side on the ground.  
“Did I hurt you earlier?” He asks suddenly.  
“Yes – no. No.” I blurt. “I don't know.”  
“It's not a hard question.”  
“You tried to saw me in half. I'm kind of trying to come to terms with that.”  
“Well, I wanted to kill you.” He says simply, smiling. A chill ripples down my spine. “But you're not the girl I'm looking for. I was going to marry her, to make her perfect – to make it all perfect.” He shakes his head. “You're not her. But you're not one of these whores, either.” He points a finger to the ceiling of the dead. “I'm rather confused about it, actually.”  
“If it keeps me alive, I hope you stay that way.” I grumble, and he stares at me fixedly. “I'm not going to let you kill me. I'll kill you first.”  
“You talk like a priest half the time and like a madwoman the other half – which are you, I wonder?” He frowns a little. “I can't kill you, anyway. I met you in a dream. It would be impossible to kill you, because you're just a figment of my imagination.”  
I bite my lip and cock my head. This man is too far gone into whatever world the fluid drowned him in. It's as if his body left the Morphogenic Engine but his mind never came out. “What makes you think that?” I ask.  
“All the others ran. You haven't.” He says. “So you must be pretend.”  
“Uh huh.” I utter, and the sarcasm is lost on him. “Your guardian angel.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Straying from the canon a bit here for the sake of artistic license. Constructive crit welcome as always. Had a lot of fun adding nuances to Eddie's character, and there will definitely be some backstory soon!  
> Enjoy!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finds out things she shouldn't.  
> She sleeps in his bed.

Day turns to dusk and I sit with my knees drawn to my chest on the bare mattress whilst Gluskin tells me he's looking for food, says I need feeding. He was mumbling to himself and humming as he left. He must have disappeared into the network of complex corridors and hospital rooms for several hours, because my backside is numb and my back aches from where I'm hunched over my own legs. But somehow, I am safe, in the very heart of the lion's den. The mallet lies in the gymnasium somewhere, and I got it back not long ago, quietly, and I've hidden it under the frame of my bed. In case he tries anything, I tell myself. I pushed the operating table to the side of the room and made myself at home the same way that I did in my small, once dingy university dorm. Gluskin is just my temperamental roommate.  
The sun has arced its way through the sky and my eyes have closed themselves for intermittent naps, I've been curled on my side with the cold running down deep into my bones and the one-piece drying slowly, still stinking of chemical fluid. I've only now been able to pause, to look down and notice my body, and there are cuts and welts covering my arms, nicks that sting all over my crooked white fingers. I lick most of my wounds and search the barren room around me for antiseptic and dressing, whilst kicking the arrays of saw blades into a pile in the corner of the room. I throw my bed-sheet over them and try to forget they exist. I'm staying only until he gives me sustenance and information enough so that I can find a way out of the gymnasium and all its surrounding rooms, to somewhere with a map. When he returns, with his slow gait and large tapered hands, he's holding armfuls of metal cans. I lift my head away from the sight of the darkening sky fringed with apricot and the scarlet of oxygenated blood and see him illuminated by the moving square of sunlight that's been creeping like a tired animal up the walls and towards the ceiling.  
“You're still here.” He says with something like a sigh, and his blue eyes lose the feverish, panicked glint they had when he first entered. He places several of the cans at the end of my mattress as if approaching a dangerous animal and then takes a step or two backwards. “It was very quiet, I didn't know if you'd gone.”  
Feeling bizarrely calmed by my naps and clearing of the room, I shake my head slowly. “No. I was just sleeping.” I say, feeling how my lids droop over my eyes somewhat. My head is still propped on my knees, and I yawn.  
“Good.” He says with an uncertain smile, and he sits on the edge of his bed, watching me with knitted brow. Glances around. “Have you moved things?”  
“I... yeah, sorry. Didn't think you'd be needing the table of death.” I offer a half-smile, and silence settles upon us. He knots and interlaces his fingers before him. I crawl to the end of the bed and pick up a tin of canned peaches.  
“Is that okay? I'm sorry, it was all I could find – the cafeteria is Pyro's territory.” He shrugs a shoulder and turns his face away, leaving him in shadow. A slice of blue for his eye just about visible.  
“Pyro?” I ask, and his entire demeanour takes me aback. He seems transformed from the person I met only yesterday, the man who tried to murder me this morning. It must be part of a plot.  
“The Pyromaniac. Nobody knows his real name; dear boy is maniacally depressed. No one ever knew quite what to do with him. Pleasant enough, but somebody's been thwarting his attempts to burn the entire building down, so he's not in the best mood at the moment.” He sighs, and the sound is so low it's almost as resonant as a lion's purr. The vibration of the noise brings the hairs on my arms upright and the warmth of it seizes me by the gut.  
I take my attention away from him by peeling back the metal lid from the can experimentally, with the clumsy curiosity of a monkey, then prise my fingers inside and cuss as I cut one of them along the rim. He nearly jumps to his feet.  
“M'fine.” I say, and laughter catches in my throat. He was happy to rend me in two this morning and now he can't stand the sight of me hurting. Something is completely wrong here. The light catches the thick peach juices and suddenly hunger overwhelms me, and I stick my cut finger into the can and prise out slice after slice of the slippery fruit. I'm happily destroying the can and its contents in my desperation for sustenance when I feel his eyes on me, and I turn to glower at him with juice drooling down my chin. Humiliation makes my cheeks burn and I swallow quickly, saying, like an excuse, “I don't think I've eaten in days.” Silence. “And I love peaches.”  
“I thought ladies were brought up to have... manners.” He says with some disdain, and I return to plucking peaches from the can, because he can look down his nose at me all he wants, I really don't care. I have my peaches and I have my mallet, and I never knew that happiness could be so simple. I tip the can and pour the remaining juices into my mouth, licking my lips and slumping, sated, on the mattress.  
“That was amazing. Thanks.” I offer, because he's still staring, so perhaps he wants my gratitude. If it keeps my genitals in one piece, I'll cough up.  
“You're welcome.” He says, and he still has the look of one studying a particularly interesting specimen of insect, brow wrinkled and head cocked. His mouth quirks into a small smile.  
“I have a question.” I say. “Do you have a map of the mental hospital, with all its outlying buildings, its grounds? I need to navigate my way around to look for supplies.” The words roll so easily from my tongue, and I'm surprised by how at ease I am with lying when it's within these wretched asylum walls. I used to be so honest.  
“Darling, there're no maps of the asylum besides in Blaire's office. And you'd need a dozen maps to get there.”  
“I'm not your darling. I've said this before.” I murmur, and his gaze clashes with mine. “Nobody owns me. No one ever will.”  
“Stubborn.” He grumbles, and his blue eyes are unyielding, icy, as he observes me. “I thought that guardian angels were supposed to grant wishes.” He says, and the words are so laced with sarcasm that his sharp wit cuts me. I bite back some idiotic retort and merely huff under my breath. “Will possessing a map really help you?”  
“Yes. Certainly.” I nearly snap. I pick up the second can – this one's pineapple, which makes me significantly less happy, but it will do – and turn it over in my hands. “My name is Joan, by the way. In case you were wondering.”  
“Joan. Like the Saint?” He muses, and I find myself grinning.  
“No, like the comedienne.” I turn to look at him. He's watching me wolfishly, lips slightly parted, and the silence stretches between us like a thread to hold. He draws his bottom lip between his teeth and idly sucks on it, and I find myself observing the natural upward curve of his mouth in the corners, the snide twist to his lip where the scar tissue has partially healed, the tip of his tongue so red that his mouth looks swimming with blood. Or lollipop red, the kind of vibrant claret achieved only by artificial colourings, saccharine sweet and terrible for you. His ghostly, barely-there eyes with the cruel rim of red. I nearly forget to breathe.  
“You must be some kind of Saint.” He says quietly, and the words stir me, a chill dragging its fingers along my spine. I drop the can onto the mattress and watch the light play in his eyes. The evening is coming. Soon it will be dark and the sun won't stand between us. What will we become? “Saints have a way of using words to make you stop committing sins – Father Martin, our priest here, always said so. You used words to stop me from hurting you. I don't know how you did it, but you did.”  
“I'm not a Saint. I'm not here to save you.” I barely whisper, the words dying inside my mouth like small, fragile birds.  
“You make me wish I wasn't going to hell.” He says, then panic crosses his eyes and he falls silent, turning his face away into the dark once more. “You make me wish I didn't -” But he doesn't finish. I see his Adam's apple bobbing, casting a shadow over his throat, and he's trying to contain his emotion. He gasps for breath then stops.  
“You don't have to say anything.”  
“I nearly killed you –” He stumbles over the words, struggling to control his breathing. I don't know how to respond, so I tug idly on the opener of the can of tinned pineapple, watch the metal wink back at me in the light. The minutes pass. I decide to say something.  
“When I first saw you, it wasn't just the guilt that got to me. You said something that didn't leave my head for one second afterwards. You said the men were going to – to rape you.” The word is so ugly, so violent, on my tongue that I can barely utter it. It's my most hated word. It has a sound like something sharp clawing its way along the inside of your throat as you say it. Gluskin flinches as if the word hurts him. “I – I thought, there's only one reason someone would assume they were going to be raped. And that is, if they have been raped already. I've seen it. I've... I've been there. I couldn't stop thinking about you after that.”  
“You've been... raped?” He asks, and his voice is soft, but the words slap me across the face. I suddenly feel violently sick, and I put the can of pineapple slices down between my crossed legs. I rub my brow with my fingers, and he's still watching me, stolid and undeterred.  
“It's hard to say.” I murmur, and the words split the silence in two, like cracking open a fruit and letting the pulp of passing time drip down your fingers. “People think it's so simple. I don't know if it was rape, or if I've been telling myself that. It's just hard to trust your own memory. Other crimes, they're based on things you can see, feel, touch. You can verify them. The arsonist burns and the murderer murders. The rapist... they don't leave a mark.”  
“Bruises. Cuts.” He says, and I turn to face him, my face feeling hot and fierce, lit up with sudden emotion.  
“Does the pain mean you didn't consent? I don't think so. You can ask a lover for bruises and you can love them. But the police can't point a finger and tell if you wanted it. Sometimes you don't even know if you want it yourself – that's why it's difficult. I can't look that far back in my memory.”  
“Who did it?” The snarl has returned to his voice, and his mouth twitches, as if memories of his own have bubbled to the surface. His eyes are playing the tape of scenes upon scenes, places from his childhood.  
“Just a boy. He didn't matter.” I shrug. “Not a big deal.” And it was only my mouth he violated, I tell myself. Although it felt like more. It felt like pieces of me had been removed and I've spent the past three years searching for the scars, for the exit wounds. “You... what happened to you?”  
“Me?” He chokes, and his eyes dart from me to the descending darkness. I follow his gaze and see the lingering warmth of gold sunlight dissipating, the night wrapping its cool arms around the building. Every sound makes my senses shudder as if every nerve in me is shot, burnt out. “My father and uncle. Since I was young.” His neck tenses, and the muscles look tight, writhing like a slipknot around him. “That's all.”  
I nod slowly, rest my chin on my knees. “Uh huh.” I murmur, and then it's as if he snaps shut. He rises to his feet, pats down his slacks, then fixes me with those irrevocable eyes.  
“You can't sleep here. It's no place for a lady.”  
“I eat sliced peaches with my fingers. I can vouch for the fact that I'm not a lady.”  
“I can't have that.” He shakes his head. “If you're going to be here, you must at least allow me to show some hospitality.” I briefly consider telling him that if his idea of hospitality is greeting genitals with a hacksaw then it's a pretty outdated social convention, but I decide against this and instead cock my head.  
“Okay.”  
“You can borrow my room – I'll sleep here.” He breathes, adding, “This way.” Then we exit the room and he leads me down the corridor again towards the gymnasium, and the bleak grey darkness of the evening looks furry behind the barred glass of every window. Behind a veil of cloud in the sky is the loop of white, tired moon, casting her eyes over this godforsaken place and peering at the window. The stars gnash like white teeth, like pale fireflies, against the backdrop of soft cobalt and pewter cloud. The moonlight falls over his shoulders and the back of his neck, and he opens a door at the end of the corridor with a key from his waistcoat pocket. I drink in the sight, fixedly staring at the ring of keys – two of brass, one of silver metal, and it flashes through my mind that he may be holding my way out, my path to Jess. I make sure to watch as he opens the door to the new room, only a little distance from the mass grave of the gym, where he places his keys once he's done. Twirls them round his long index finger then back into the deep pocket of his waistcoat.  
“Here.” He says, doesn't notice me eyeing him. He holds the door open and I stand by the pitch dark doorway, looking in. A tall window at the far end of the room illuminates what must have been a show and locker room for the gymnasium, but has now been converted into a bizarre and rudimentary bedroom. There's a wide bed, unlike the bare frames in the other room, with a mattress two hands high, a dark crimson coverlet thrown over the top. A drape of red silk arcs its way over the left side of the room, opposite the window, crawling across the walls to conceal tiles and clothing pegs. Other long stretches of material, each dark and soft in shades of purple or red – bruise colours, I note – have been pinned to the walls and ceilings until the half of the room with the bed is somehow enmeshed in baroque patterns and warm, dark colour. It could almost be a bedroom. On the floor, a rug beneath the simple silver frame of the bed, covering the ugly pale tiles of the shower and locker room. I realise he's thought this through – the dark velvet drapes absorb the sound and light in the room, and prevent it from looking clinical, stop the ominous echoes that would otherwise pervade the space. I've trailed of my body's own volition into the room and look to my right to see a small set of lockers and a shower with the door open. The tiles are somewhat grimy and the lockers are dented and a dour shade of grey, but the room is such a pleasant departure from anything I've seen lately that tears gather in my eyes. My throat clots with relief, and I choke back sobs.  
“It's rather, uhm – well, it's a work in progress – but it's like a bedroom with an en suite, you see.” Then he adds, sounding shocked, “Are you crying?”  
“No.”  
“But you sound like you are-”  
“I'm not crying. I'm fine. I'm just – I'm really tired.” I say quickly, and he lingers in the doorway. I blink back the wet and turn to face him, and fear shoots through me again. He tried to kill me this morning and now I'm sleeping in his bed. This is fucked. This is so fucked. “Thank you.”  
“There's an oil lamp right here.” He says, and his eyes are soft on me, enquiring. “If you need anything, come and tell me... Goodnight, Joan.” Then the door closes, and I'm enclosed in silence.  
I listen for his footsteps and hear a key turning in the lock, and my stomach literally drops in my body. He's locking me in for the night. I close my hands into fists and glower at the door. Why tell me to come and fetch him if he's going to keep me in here? Is he playing a game with me? Of course he is. I'm probably one of many to sleep in this room, a reward to lull me into a false sense of security to he can kill me, string me up like a puppet with all the others in the gymnasium -  
I stop this train of thought immediately, because his footsteps are back again. I've stopped dead in the centre of the room. Then there's a rustling and I see a folded up piece of paper pushed under the door. I stoop and pick it up once the sound of him has disappeared. Unfold it and hold it up to the light of the window. In slanting, uncertain but pretty script, it says, 'There's some clothes in the shower on the far right, if you need them.'  
“Thanks.” I mumble. “But no thanks.” I fold it back up and put it on the dresser. This is all a bit too Phantom of The Opera for me. Then I look down at the ugly one-piece, the beige fabric that chafes between my legs and carries the stench of anaesthesia and pod fluid and I unzip it angrily, shrugging the horrible thing to the floor in derision. I'm now completely naked in the room, my feet on the cold tiles, and I look down at my own body, devoid of undergarments. I must have been stripped bare by Blair's men, like an animal for slaughter. Bruises litter my stomach in big ugly blooms of purple, green and bile yellow, in the shapes of fists or boots or fingers all overlaid in an endless stream of hurt I must have endured. I can't recall any fighting before being put in the Engine, can only remember Jess' heart-rending screams, but I must have fought them. I look close to emaciated, like the photographs of prisoners of war that the teachers used to show us in middle school. People so starved that they no longer looked like people, but like underfed cattle. I cuss under my breath and kick the hideous one-piece where it slumps on the floor like dead skin, bundle it up and decide to toss it into one of the shower cubicles, where I feel violated all over again and have to ram on the water.  
The shower-head is filmed with lime-scale and grime, but the water, to my complete surprise and joy, streams out hot and clear, making red dye stream across my shoulders in defiance of the endless grey of the hospital. Steam rises and the tears disappear into water, the dirt washes from my feet, the congealed blood from my cuts lost along with some of the colour from my hair. I find a sliver of a bar of soap and lather myself completely, sighing and swearing and muttering to myself endlessly, realising that for the first time in my recent memory, I feel safe. I'm locked in this room, and so somehow that makes me feel secure.  
“Messed up.” I self-assess, shaking the water from my hair and finding a towel folded up on a metal rack. I rough-dry my hair to stop the dye dripping and them wrap it around myself, turning off the water and stepping out into the room. “Then again, everything is messed up here. It's all relative. I should be a bit messed up – enough to survive – but a bit less messed up than everyone else. That makes it okay.” The chatter to myself hardly ceases, and perhaps I've only just come to terms with how starved of proper company I've been, how unable to talk.  
Out of curiosity, I investigate the shower cubicle to the far right, and upon pulling back the curtain once, it's impossible to shut it again or even look away. There, on clothing hangers on the towel rack, are about twenty tailored dresses in various fabrics; black velvet, deep maroon and purple with ornate and opulent dark prints, one in iridescent green and blue, and the rest all in white. Wedding dresses, some with lace backs, some with corsets sewn along the spine with steady, particular hands. I reach in, feeling the inside of one of the dresses closest to me, its slim fit, the soft inner panels, and see that there's no label of a brand, no tag, nothing at all to identify it. It must be an original. I contemplate trying one on for size, then the note flashes in my minds eye once more and I huff and pick up the grubby one-piece, turning on the shower and scrubbing it clean with soap and my bare hands. I'm not going to wear one of those ridiculous handmade dresses, probably sewn on the machines I passed barely a day ago, fashioned by the large and balanced hands of a murderer. I'll bet he knows his way around anatomy the way he knows his way around a sewing machine. Then it hits me, I recall the lopsided breasts sewn onto the male corpse, the small stitches, the completely fevered perfectionistic way each body was positioned – there can be no other explanation. He's making dresses for the girl he wants to find. The girl enough like his mother so that, when he kills her, it will somehow set right all the wrong that was done to him.  
The blood is thundering around me and the one-piece is looking more desirable by the second. I don't want to flaunt myself in one of those scant dresses, lacking any kind of underwear, looking remotely desirable. They remind me of the jewellery that rich Lords and Counts used to give their young wives – gifts to appease female vanity. Well, not me. Sure as hell not me.  
“This isn't so bad.” I grumble as I scrub a stain out of the one-piece with my fingernails.  
My eyes keep flitting back to that rack of dresses, and each glance sickens me more. What did his mother do to warrant this obsession with romance, with marriage? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps there is no reasoning behind it. I lift the now-clean garment from where it slumps wet and sad at the bottom of the shower, wring it out in my hands, feel my naked body drip with water and shudder with cold. I shrug into the fabric and it plasters itself to my nudity, and I realise just how stupid it is, wearing wet clothes when there's such an array of beautiful ones only several metres away. Like a bejewelled death-trap, I remind myself. I'd rather catch a cold than be seen in such a thing.  
I find a box of matches and use them to light the oil lamp, and the warmth of the small flame nearly makes me smile. The desk is littered with papers, photographs, and the smiling face of a dark-haired woman burns itself into my consciousness. She has a high brow with a widow's peak, and her eyes are slate grey, the colour of antique silverware or shoals of fish in shallow water. There's globules of dried red wax on the corners of the photograph, and spattering her smiled-lined mouth. I flip over the photo and see written in Gluskin's same handwriting, “Mom at Brewer's Lake, 1971.” Underneath this photograph is another, a smaller Polaroid in faded sepia, of two men and a young boy standing before the dark surface of a lake rimmed by pinion conifers, pine trees, the sun beating down and bleaching their eyes and faces. One of the men is stocky with streaks of grey in his hair, an arm around the taller, leaner man with the black moustache. Both wear plaid shirts, the grey-haired man's shirt unbuttoned, revealing a bloated belly, the elasticated waistband of his three-quarter length pants. The other man has something disconcerting about him, the rod-straight posture making it almost impossible for me to tear my eyes away. The child, clearly Gluskin, wears a smile that is stiff. A boy teetering between two realities, treading the line between confusion and love for these men and hatred and vindictiveness. Too young to know that what was inflicted on him was not what happened in every household. Soon, I picture it within the mirror of my own mind, he will grow into a handsome and vicious young man with a straight pale jaw and a set mouth. Soon, he will realise that the fingernails clawing into him, the insults, the words and the blood, are an abnormality. And he will kick and scream, and now I begin to understand, as the clouds outside coalesce. Thunder claps in the night like a revelation. His mother didn't save him. He can't forgive her. I flip over the photograph and, in his shaky script, it reads “Father and Uncle Peter.” I can tell just from his childhood self's expression, from the way the men's fingers inter-link softly over Gluskin's supple shoulder, the inevitability of bedroom scenes.  
Beneath this, another letter, written on paper as thin as the upper epidermis of skin, covered in scrawl on both sides. I lift it in my hands. Rain begins to batter through the crack in the open window and my skin prickles. I read it silently with fervid eyes, and the words are in his voice. “Brewer's Lake was our family retreat that we visited every other summer, for fishing trips, for the salmon and the brown bears. The place was otherwise uninhabited excluding our log cabin, stretching long and dark like a lizard on the bank of the black water. Grime, moss and weathering even made the effect of scales. The light used to fall in my bedroom window at nine o'clock every morning just the same, gold and blood red over the pine trees. I was woken by the birds. My mother took off for hikes and woke me with a cup of lemon tea, a kiss on the forehead. She left and didn't come back until evening. She never said so, but she was fucking a man who worked at a gas-station several miles away, the snake-eyed slut. Leaving father pacing the halls, and she hardly slept with him, he said, he told me over his morning coffee that it was a crime. I sat on the stool in the kitchen with breakfast laid out and I was so small my feet didn't touch the floorboards. Uncle Peter always stood behind me, hips cocked to one side, nodding as my father spoke. He was the one who ratted the whore out. He took pleasure in it. Father told me that he simply had to touch someone, and that it was my responsibility. I had to. I had to. I was his son and I “owed my old man a good time.” Uncle Peter got in on it, too, he was so enthusiastic it makes the bile rise in my throat just remembering it. Pushed his cock against me through the fabric of his shorts and I remember thinking it would be alright, it would be fun – I never said 'yes', but I didn't say 'no' at first either. It's a boy's instinct to want to please his father.”  
The note shakes in my quivering hands and I don't know if I can stomach this.  
I get up, gasp for air, feeling my throat close up as if I'm about to have an asthma attack. The paper smells of pinewood, or maybe it's just my imagination, but I can see it so clearly that I can't blink the visual away. Eddie Gluskin as a child being cornered by two men. Does it excuse the murders, the bodies? My mind reels. No, it excuses nothing.  
“It felt like they tore something deep inside me. The church back home spoke about the sin of sodomy, of wanting to be fucked by a man, and I couldn't live with myself that I had let men touch me. The worst part was, sometimes being touched lightly felt almost bearable, only the glimmer of pleasure was eradicated, hopelessly destroyed, only moments later. Uncle Peter stepped on my back in dirty hunting boots and made me clean them with my tongue. Father took photographs and said he would show the church if I didn't behave, that he would tell them how I was possessed by the devil and they would exorcise me. Sawn-off shotgun barrel in my mouth, inside me, jeans belts cutting into my back and my rear, and I cried until I had nothing left but dry, raw ugly sobbing. Can't wash the scars out of my skin. Can't undo what they did to me. When I was eighteen, they both had “something special” planned. They were going to take me to a club where up to ten men could have me at once. They told me over the kitchen table at home. Mother was ironing in the living room. I kept looking to her for support, for her to tell them 'no', but she turned up the TV instead. Father said she thought it was a good idea. She turned around only once and caught my eye, and there was guilt there, enough to make my insides burst, enough to make me grab a knife from the drawer and shakily raise it to them both. It was difficult. It was ugly and like butchering an animal whilst it still kicks and bites you. In the movies, killing a man is easy – a slit in the throat, a puncture to the gut, but not so in real life. Not so. Tussles on the floor, getting my face kicked in, having to slice again and again and again and they kept moaning and choking up blood on the tiles. My mother screamed. I had to completely obliterate my father's face with a knife to get him to stop talking. I pushed Uncle Peter's face in the sink and got the blade nestled in the gristle between his shoulders. I turned to my mother and I said something with a burning rage, and she told me she had known all along. She told me she was scared, that she couldn't go to the police. I didn't want to kill her. I didn't want to, but I did it. I-”  
I throw the letter back on the dresser and cover it with the turned-over photographs. That's enough. I don't want to read any more. I don't want to be coaxed into any kind of empathy. I turn to the darkened window and see the black world outside, streaked with billowing rain, and I know I can no longer stay here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene originally became very sexual but I thought better of it because I just don't think it's in Joan's character. Instead, I thought I'd use this to explore Eddie a bit more. It took me quite a while to write this because I had a block, but I'm super pleased with how this turned out.  
> Enjoy!


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She takes a risk.  
> It doesn't exactly pay off.
> 
> (TW for graphic gore and body horror)

I have to leave, to reach a vantage point and see the buildings from a great height, determine the layout and write it down. Then I can find a lucid patient and ask after Jess – I could even find the communication room where the CCTV footage is kept, as I presume they must, and search it for her to find out where she is. I gather my resolve and push the semi-rusted window open further, rain immediately buffeting my face, making my hair sopping wet. I gasp against the brutal chill and look down into the distant ground, the pale rheumy shapes of foliage and trees and a mesh-fenced compound where several gaunt figures stagger skinny and ghost-like in the rain. A long drop. One I wouldn't survive without seriously breaking some bones – I can see it now, the broken rib that could puncture my lung, the impacted knees from the fall, the shattered legs. Then I think of the man, his dresses like death-traps, like fire to moths, the grim descriptions of murder, or things I can't bear to think about. He's killed so many times, and he will not hesitate to kill me, no matter what poetic shit he spurns.  
I'd rather die from a fall than from his ministrations.  
There's a narrow ledge and I scale it, my fingers clinging to the drainpipe along the top of the open window, water making me slip, my entire body shuddering. The cold like knives dragging along me, threading my eyelashes, slicing into my skin. Lightning brings the sky up in white ecstasy then lets it plummet down once more, into a darkness so black and inky I can scarcely see an inch in front of my face. A raindrop clings to the tip of my nose.  
I shuffle with my entire body in a spasm of tension, the blood hurtling around my ears and blotting out the world, the rasping whispers of the trees, the patients below, the storm rending the sky in two. I nearly collapse onto the tiled surface of the roof, squirming upwards with my clammy, cold hands streaked with rain and clinging to the grooves between the tiles. One is dislodged, spins past me and shatters in brittle ceramic as it skitters over the drainpipes to the ground. Panic bites at my insides and I haul myself upwards, to the crown of the roof, painfully aware of how my life depends on the strength of my pale, thin arms. My bare feet slide and slip on the roof and I nearly lose it, nearly lose my footing, a hair's breadth away from the feeling of electric agony, of bones splintering. My mind tries to stretch to accommodate that potential pain, to try and imagine what it might be like, but I can't make room for it, my head being so filled with water and electricity.  
I reach the summit of the roof and grip the row of tiles beneath me with my nails dragging along the clay, my face tilting up to see the blue velvet of the dark sky, the paler blue fringe along the horizon where trees splinter my view. The thunder rips around me and my breath is stolen from my lungs once, twice, three times, my eyes so wide I feel that I'm drinking in the world. Lightning again, this time striking the compound not far from me – the imprint lingers in my lids, a jutting crack of blue and purple and white. And around me, the thrumming noise of the thunder like horses, like baying dogs, like TV static, all at once. Like the whirr of a fan as you are almost asleep. White noise, so intense that it consumes me, possesses me until I can't think. This is the most alive I've ever felt. The rain whips my hair across my face, and it looks black as peat in the dark, and I crawl forward on this single row of tiles, trying to breathe, and I'm laughing. I'm laughing like this narrow line I tread between life and pain represents everything I've seen, everything I've felt, since I saw Gluskin and since I was regurgitated by the Morphogenic Engine. I ask myself, only now, did it affect me? Was I like this before the wires and the fluid?  
The lightning once more and I see the world lit up, the different buildings thrown under a spotlight. The gym and its compound, and then another hall not far off, two roofs away, with a glass skylight and amber and scarlet bleeding faintly through the windows. I'm drawn in, rain dripping from my lips like saliva from the maw of a dog, and I move as if hypnotised towards the source of the light. Come to the edge of the roof and lower myself onto the next one, the height not stirring fear, only excitement, a coiling in my lower stomach to see death so near once more. Taunting me, but not able to touch me. My heart syncopates with the rain.  
I drop down like a cat and continue my way, sliding this way and that in the wet, struggling for balance, everything slick and cobalt and black from the damp. My own reflection thrown back at me in the tiles – dark hair stuck to a wild, starved face, eyes like caves. My feet look alien as I crouch and move on hands and heels, still fixated by the light. I'm vaguely aware that I don't feel like myself, I feel departed from my body. I remember myself in the window of the mental hospital wearing the formal shoes, my clothes smelling of Jess's detergent and our coffee, my red hair snarled and my eyes panicked. I begin to doubt myself, my very sanity, as I see myself as if from a bird's eye view, small and shifting like a beetle across roofs more than twenty feet off the ground. My foot slips as I think, and the world shifts underneath me, falling away. White and black and the roar of thunder as I crash into wood. Scream out in agony, nothing making sense besides the all-consuming pain. I've tumbled onto scaffolding, wooden planks pinioning the side of the brick building for reconstruction work. And there's blood everywhere, dark but unmistakable. Warmth spreading through me, my leg hot and pulsing, both numb and nerve-splittingly electrified all at once. There's a metal shaft about as thick as my wrist spearing my calf.  
I'm lying on my back on the wood structures with the scaffolding criss-crossing about me in silver swords, and I can't see anything but the leg with the muscle exposed and the bone and the blood too red to be real. Pain makes me woozy and for a second I'm dreaming, my leg is not my leg, this is not happening, it is all a fast-moving piece of cinematography. I'm detached from the blood loss, from the shock, from the paralytic pain. In one ebbing moment everything moves very fast and very slowly at the same time. Then I'm sucked back into reality and I'm gushing blood so rapidly that I immediately panic. I try to sit up but my whole body feels absent from my will. I can't move. My hands shake in front of my face, pale and corpse-like with blue veins. The metal is buried in my leg and the serrated silver head is nearly emerging from the other side.  
I'm screaming. I'm screaming for help and I'm screaming for my mother. I press my hand to the limb that seems ghostly, immovable but also on fire, a phantom to me. My own pulse is delivered to me with unnerving familiarity like seeing a picture of yourself that you don't at first recognise as you. Like catching your face in the mirror as you walk and, for a second, you are not you. You're just a passer-by.  
“I need to get it out. It will be fine.” I'm babbling to myself under the thunder, which seems so distant now. “It'll be fine. I'll go to the hospital and get it-” I can't speak any more. The pain lights me up from my toes all along my spine and rockets through me, makes my head throw itself back and an animal cry charge out of my mouth. I need to get it out. But will it bleed more? Will I pass out from blood loss? How is there so much blood inside me? There can't be this much, there's so much. My shaking hands hovering over the mangled mess of my leg. Then I have another small moment of lucidity and, using my teeth and my nails, painstakingly tear off the sleeve of the one-piece. It's not like it is in the movies. Frayed stitches everywhere and blood already covering the fabric. My head hums and I can't hear a thing. I have to take it out. I lift my leg in my hands and feel myself sob as I lift it an inch, only to let go again and convulse. I can't do this. I'm going to die here. Then in one moment of courage I lean over the limb and I wrench it upwards, and the muscle makes an obscene shlop as the metal is released from its flesh sheath – pulsing, ardent blood and pain override me and my vision is fringed by black as I try to wrap the fabric around. The whole wood plateau is stained with my blood. I wrap it round and tie it and look away. I try to get up. I end up crawling, dragging myself along the wooden pathways vexed precariously to this building. Tears have been streaming down my face and the animal cries are still leaving me. Every second drags into an eternity. My heart beats in my leg.  
I fervidly scrabble on until the plateaus are lower, lower to the ground, then I collapse in absolute surrender and roll onto the concrete, my elbows and head beaten by the gravel. The world turns from lightning white to black in one second. The landscape snaps its fingers over my eyes and I fall into a bruising sleep. 

Woodland noises, animals wailing, footsteps, all distorted. The suck and slap of noise against my ears and water kissing my skin, numbing my body until I feel as if I have partially melted into the concrete, glued myself to the ground. I can't get up. My mouth is open and I'm salivating against the concrete and the world underneath me is slipping, moving like sandpaper against my skin. The world revolves and turns on its axis and I am dragged along with it like flotsam on waves, like the wheat between two wheat-stones.  
Burnt smell. Discomfort that prevents sleep from gripping me, but my body feels bound to a table. I swear I can feel the restraints all across me, someone sitting on my chest, a weight pressing my skin like sourdough. I sink into a hard floor and I can smell charred meat and toast. White light claws at my eyes with its devilish little fingers and tries to pry them open, to coax me away from unconsciousness. Someone is speaking in a tongue my mind can't disassemble enough to make sense of. I mumble unintelligible nothings through the haze of my pain, until light and lucidity comes in a wave.  
“Eddie. Gluskin.” The words leave me, sounding foreign, sounding raw and ripped around the edges.  
“Sorry, what'd you say?” Is the reply, a sonorous voice, soft and musical. “Are you talking about The Man Downstairs?”  
My eyelids force themselves open a crack, and the canted world is lit in cold pale blue, like Gluskin's piercing irises. I can still smell the rain on my clothes, my numb toes, and the memory of violent lightning and breathtaking rain is all lit in the colour of those eyes, flashing, so like him in character. Murmuring at first then breaking you. All tears and noise and the quiet before thunderclaps.  
There is another man stood before me. The left side of his face is mottled with burns, his skin looking supple and pale as wax or water, and I imagine it to be smooth to the touch. His eyes, wide and rimmed by thick and soft lashes, stare me down with wild excitement from where he leans against a metal food trolley. We're in the canteen area that used to smell of soup and now carries the acrid stench of burning, of being burnt, of the kerosene that preludes burning.  
“You're the pyromaniac.” I say quietly, and he smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter feels a bit too heavy on description, and not enough so on the action, so I'll pick up the pace in the next chapter. I felt like I needed time to get myself back into Joan's headspace and explore her a bit more.  
> The place is finally getting to her. She might just crack before she can get out.
> 
> I'm so looking forward to writing Pyro because he's hugely underused in Outlast and he's also very aware of the hopelessness of his situation. I had a lot of fun writing this one.  
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They meet the Walrider.

The burnt man with his dark strip of charcoal hair rolls his head back a little. His pale one-piece, nearly identical to mine, sops with damp, and his feet are bare. My throbbing pain nearly blocks out his response.  
“I am. For lack of a better word.” He says with a gentleness, a sense of surrender. “You're the girl that the others have been talking about. Gluskin's new house-pet.”  
“I'm not anyone's pet.” I spit in return, my fists clenched into pale balls at my sides.  
“What are you, then?” He cocks his head to the left and the cold electric lights gutter for a moment. “Do you know who keeps extinguishing my fires?”  
“No.” I mumble, and my eyes travel to the nauseating pain in my leg, the source of it. The world spins as I recall with gutting horror the iron piercing my calf, the tearing of the muscle, and now I'm confronted by the puncture wound dressed in off-white gauze. “Is the dressing clean?”  
“Yes, but the wound is infected. I've been trying to drain the puss and use alcohol to clean it, but the wound is so raw I'm afraid it will cause you pain. I wanted to wait until you woke up.” He speaks measuredly, and I nod, almost accepting this bizarre man as my practitioner.  
“I would have died there.” I say quietly, and the words snag in my throat. “Why did you do it? Why help me?” I turn to look at him, and he moves from where he leans on the trolley. He's not handsome but nor is he plain, and the savage burns on the side of his face and head leave part of his scalp cauterised, hair follicles surely redundant, with only black wiry strands here and there singed to the root. His eyes are like two tumbled obsidian stones, the kind I used to covet as a child, when I used to believe in the power of crystals, of meditation. The light glints off them like dark water. He kneels beside me and he smells of kerosene.  
“The fire.” He drawls, and I see from this scarce distance the way that some of his lashes have been burnt and scar tissue makes one of his eyelids swell. But the deep, enchanting colour of those nearly-black eyes is unsullied by the world. “I need someone to help me light the flames, and you looked so... appropriate for the job.” A pause, and his lip curls at some joke I don't catch onto. Gaze flits across my face, my hair, and I stare back at him stonily. What does he really want? Am I leverage in a plot? Most likely. “Besides, I haven't seen many of the Groom's pets. You've lasted a long time. You deserve a break.”  
“The Groom?”  
“Gluskin. Eddie Gluskin, the Man Downstairs, we call him. Or the beast below.” That's some nice alliteration. Could make a jingle out of that. His eyes crinkle and the scar tissue catches the light, mottled white like the bark of a silver birch. “What's your name?”  
“Jessica.” I don't know why I lie, but it slips off the tongue with ease, and he accepts my response, shaking my limp hand briefly.  
“Why are you here?” He murmurs. “Actually, more importantly; can you stand?”  
“Probably. Give me a second.” I huff and try to swing my legs over the side of the metal food trolley, not unlike the one he leant against, that I've been sprawled across. The wheels of the trolley squeak under the strain and the thing rattles. I'm nearly crippled once more by a wave of sickness, and I half-fall from the trolley, grasping the stranger for support, my fists seizing the front of his clothes. He stiffly holds my shoulders and pain erupts in my leg from the knee downwards, any movement in my ankle, any weight pushed down into the leg, causing me popping white pain that erupts behind my eyes. I collapse to the ground and wail, sounding broken, into the pyromaniac's leg. A small part of me is vaguely aware that this is humiliating. I grit my teeth at my own incompetence.  
“Alcohol. We need to clean the wound – will you be okay on your own for a moment?” He disentangles himself from my unyielding grasp, and it takes me a minute or two to unravel my fingers from their corpse-like grip on him. He offers me a partly pitying, partly bemused look as he ambles around a makeshift fort of upended tables and trolleys and into a dark side-room. I shudder on the floor, which has a thin veil of damp throwing my own reflection back at me. The gauze is soiled with dark red and yellow, and the acidic stench of bile reaches me from the leg. To my own amazement and shame, tears patter to meet the kerosene on the cafeteria tiles, the saltiness mingling with the fuel. My leg is going to be putrefied. It'll have to be cut off. My limb, part of my body, my entity, helplessly rotting, going stale with pain, underneath gauze that is doing nothing to help it. Nothing. There's no escape from the infection – it pervades the building, the very air I'm breathing.  
I need to find Jess. I need to get out of here. Did I deliver the pyromaniac her name as mine because she's so ingrained in my thoughts? It's likely. My tears streak my filthy face, then I pull myself together. I stop thinking of my family back home, of the sunlit porch and our languid azure-eyed cat.  
The pyromaniac makes noise in the side-room and mumbles to himself.  
“Right – this is good, Jessica. I got something to wash it out, and some painkillers. Should do you a world of good.” He returns, vaulting over the barricade of tables and coming to meet me on the floor. He pops the lid on a bottle of aspirin and hands me two, then his eyes meet mine. “Are you alright?”  
“Yes.”  
“Do you need a different kind of medication – I saw some diazepam not long ago in one of the labs-”  
“No, honestly. I'm fine.” I bite down on my lower lip and he goes silent for a moment, clearly awkward, then clears his throat and points to the trolley. “Can you sit up there?”  
He helps me back onto the structure, my legs dangling over the side like that of a child. He's kneeling on the ground, looking up at me anxiously. He drags a bucket out from under a nearby table and puts it under my leg.  
“Will it need that?” I ask, panicked.  
“Just breathe. Yes, it will. We have to drain it before the infection becomes worse. Then I'm going to find a tetanus vaccine. Okay?”  
“You don't have to do this.” I choke, and he shrugs.  
“You might want to close your eyes.”  
I do as he asks. I can feel his deft fingers unwrap the gauze, and the smell becomes so powerful that I cry all over again, stifling sobs by sticking my fist in my mouth. The ever-present pain feels louder, thrumming in my ears, possessing my whole body. We're all so fragile. We're all so breakable. The pyromaniac does not stir, hardly breathes, and I hear the glass on tile noise of a bottle being placed down, the pop of air as he opens it. Some pills are forced into my other hand.  
“Can you take them dry?”  
“Uh huh.” I split them in half down the groove with my fingers and muster up enough saliva to swallow, busying myself with this task and trying not to think about the feeling of hot thick liquid running down my leg, the patter of a droplet hitting the bottom of the bucket. Then the sharp, quick agony of alcohol-wet bandages rubbing against the open wound makes me gasp, makes me cuss so loud my sounds echo off the walls.  
“I – fuck, stop! Please – stop!” I nearly choke on the last of the aspirin and feel it go down dry as sandpaper in my throat. The blue-white electric light, the sweat collecting on my skin like cellophane, his silence, makes me nearly vomit. “I said stop it!” He doesn't, simply carries on swabbing, grasping my leg by the ankle and holding it still.  
“It's reacting.”  
I get a hold over myself enough to blurt, “Is that good? What do you mean 'it's reacting'?”  
“The bad stuff is coming out.”  
“I'm going to be sick.”  
“Please don't.” He says in that same level tone, and I draw blood from my bottom lip. I can't bear the sensation anymore, opening my eyes and glancing automatically to the source of the stinging agony, to see the wet red mess of the leg with the white flesh tinged purple and veined all around it, bile-coloured puss with its acidic odour gathering on the surface like oil repelled by water. “I told you not to look.” He growls.  
I'm merely sitting rod-straight, staring and shaking, disgustingly fixated. I heave breaths through my mouth to stop the stench from reaching me through my nostrils. He swipes again and again, drawing out the infection, depositing it into the bucket and stopping it from trickling down my ankle like spittle. The process continues on and on and we sit in a pained stupor of silence. The thick liquid is seemingly endless, and my flesh is soon numb to the pain. His features are crisp as linen, adjusted to the situation, and I watch him tirelessly with open mouth, his measured attitude. I try to match my heartbeat to the metronome of his pulse that I feel through his hand.  
It must take an hour, perhaps a little more, until the wound is raw and red and pulsing. I'm both horrified and held captive by the disastrous state of my own body.  
“Do we need to let it air, or cover it?” I ask.  
“I've got no idea.” He replies.  
My gaze flashes red and angry towards him, and he adds, “What you need is a tetanus jab, clean gauze, to drain the pus and then have it stitched to stop further infection.”  
“And you... you know this stuff? You're a professional?”  
“I'm a patient.” He says. “I've seen enough pain to know how to deal with it.”  
“I trust you. I don't know why, but you have a look about you that requires trusting.” The alcohol, the relief of draining the infected bile, has gone to my head. Not to mention the kerosene. “It's your eyes. I'd be dead or maimed if you hadn't done something, and you had no reason to help me. I – yeah. Thanks.”  
“Let the leg sit for a couple minutes. Night air might help it. It'll cool it off.” He moves to the emergency exit and props the doors open, lets in the furry grey darkness of very early morning. His dark, lean shape is drawn out like vowel sounds in a black shadow across the gleaming, wet tiles. “You must want some ice for it, right?”  
“Sounds delicious.” I say, and he snorts with laughter. Silence falls for a moment and he regards me quietly.  
“Why would someone like you come here?”  
“I saw Eddie Gluskin. When they put him in the Engine. It was an accident – a nurse named Norma Frasier was trying to out Murkoff's experiments to the public, and tried to use me as a ploy, but it went completely wrong. They knew I didn't belong here. Then I endangered my best friend, my family, because I was desperately trying to get back – I couldn't live with just, just letting people be so inhumane. I didn't know Gluskin at the time. Now I need to get my friend and get out.”  
“Did you walk in?” He nearly laughs, though his eyes are sad. I shake my head, and he makes a small noise of affirmation. “Of course. I knew Norma Frasier for a time - she treated me."  
"What was she like?"  
"A nice enough woman." He says softly, eyes not focused on me, on anything here, for a moment. "I was admitted for depression. I was one of the only ones here who had not been violent, so she liked me, I think - treated me like a friend, almost. But she had a way of regarding patients as if we were volatile animals. She pitied us, but also feared us. I never did know quite what to think of her." A pause. "I was put into the Morphogenic Engine because I had a high level of education - a degree in Linguistics, a masters, a stable job in a state school. They wanted to see what the Engine would do to someone like me. Someone almost - I despite the word - 'normal.'" He grimaces. "Did Blair find you, drag you here?”  
“He tortured my friend and I. I've got no idea where she is. This is going to sound rude, me changing the subject, but do you know any maps of this place, anywhere I can find CCTV footage? I want to see where she went after the patients took control over the hospital. That's when we got split up.”  
The man goes very still, his dark eyes resting on me like the shifting weight of a pendulum. “What did your friend look like?” He asks, very softly.  
“Why, do you think you've seen her?” I begin to panic, and he squeezes my shoulder firmly with one scarred hand. He has prominent knuckles and short, thick fingers that are made to look leathered and ancient. My hand comes to rest on his, and I stare for a moment at the stark difference between us – his gnarled, whorled brown skin, my long white fingers, the blood underneath my fingernails. “Please, tell me.”  
“I saw a girl, not long ago. I couldn't think much of it because... well, doctor Trager was stalking her through the corridors. I can't stand him, so I hid in the storeroom, behind the old refrigerators. She's probably dead.”  
“No. She can't be.” Then I push his hand away in derision. “Tell me, what did she look like?”  
“Long brown hair, dark eyes. She was wearing a red plaid shirt and sneakers, the laces all undone. She was holding a plank of wood like a weapon, just staggering around. She was screaming for someone.”  
“What did she say?”  
“Somebody called 'Joan.' She was calling out for this person, crying, her face all wet. Threatening to kill anyone who touched her.” He says, and his eyes are clawing into mine, flashing across my face with a kind of searching intelligence that discerns me, it's been so long that someone has truly looked into my eyes and seen me clearly. Gluskin saw an angel, Blair saw a threat. I wonder what the pyromaniac sees. “Is that your real name? Joan?”  
“It doesn't matter.” I murmur, and his expression twists into one of dismay, of guilt.  
“Doctor Trager is sadistic. I don't think-” Then his words catch in his throat as something clatters beyond the open fire exit door. Noise like radio static coasts in on the air, and he seizes me by the waist, picks me up and in one swift motion puts me over his shoulder. I move to lash out, to kick him in the gut, suddenly afraid, but his quick, rabbit-fast breathing stills me. This isn't a plot to kill me - something is wrong. He shifts silently, as if his feet are velvet-soled, into a darkened storeroom and shuts the door softly, firmly, behind us. His body is shaking, and we clumsily sink down to the floor, my stomach winded by the speed at which he picked me up.  
“What is it?” I hiss, and his coal eyes glitter in the inky black, illuminated by one hair-thin strand of light from between the door and its frame.  
I realise our faces are very close together, and he doesn't respond with words, merely presses his index finger to his lips, and my gaze is fixed to his mouth. His arm is over my shoulder and, somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the fear, I try to guess his age. His face is so prematurely lined by the Morphogenic Engine, or so I would guess, that it's difficult to determine, but his mannerisms speak of someone in their thirties or forties. His closeness is no imposition to me, him striking me like a father or an uncle, his presence a comfort. I shakily lower myself to sit on the cold tiled floor, my leg whispering pain underneath my own weight. I'm watching the light bring out golden strands of brown and red and ochre in his irises, like threads in a tapestry, and his pupil has shrunk like that of a serpent, his thin-lipped mouth open a crack as he exhales warm in my face. Then the tiny band of gold is snuffed out and I hear the electric lights gutter like a moth burning its wings against a naked bulb, the emergency exit door slamming shut with such a clamour that I jerk in surprise. My hand covers my mouth and I stuff my fingers between my teeth all the way to the white knuckles so I don't make a sound.  
There are no footsteps on the kerosene-filmed ground. The pyromaniac glances at me once, betraying fear, panic, and the smell of gas and burning is as rich on him as the stench of rainwater on our clothes. More objects clatter, break, smash violently, and still no footsteps. I envision a figure floating inches off the ground, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I hide my face in my hands and press my forehead to his shoulder. With my leg, I don't think I could run. I feel overwhelmed by my own uselessness, so shocked out of my sense of security that tears sting my eyes. Then his mouth at my ear.  
“Can you run?”  
“No.” I mouth, and he grimaces.  
“I need you to move. Very quietly.” He turns his head and now I see this room, grey on grey and black on soft black, the shapes of refrigerators and a locked door at the very back, behind a sagging pile of rice sacks and potatoes. “Trager has your friend. He's powerful, he's not lucid – be careful. You can't reason with him. Don't go running in trying to get your friend back.”  
I nod to show my understanding. The pyromaniac touches my face, curls his hand behind the shell of my ear, and the touch sends a thrill of fear and heat rattling down my spine, along my skin. “The communications room is in the block East of the church. Go there and plan what you're going to do.”  
“What will you do?” I hiss. The lights outside flash on and off, on and off, lighting a small slice of his face and then plunging me into darkness. He holds my head close and whispers directly into my ear in such a way that chills rack my sides, my whole body like a tuning fork, thrumming with every syllable.  
“I'm going to die, now.” He says quietly.  
“What? No-”  
“Nobody cares about a few forgotten lunatics. I was going to burn the whole place down, to drag the sordid building down with my depression, but... you and your friend need to get out. Perhaps this was meant to happen. I want you to take their research, take as much proof as you can of this. The Murkoff experiments made us into monsters, but once we were men. When you walk around these halls, don't see Variants. See victims.”  
“Just come with me. Just get out – we can get out, you can have a life outside of here.”  
His mouth cracks into a slow, fissured smile. “I don't think I could put it behind me. This is my home.” A pause, and there is a chill in the air emanating from the very room. It's as if the post-fire heat of charred objects, of burning, has been snuffed out and glazed over with frost. “Go.”  
And I shakily crawl away, towards the door, seeing his figure grow small and hunched over, lit up in one single strand of light. He looks like a child. I drag my lame leg after me and rise to my feet, opening the exit door, and as I do so a great gust of cold black wind rips the door to the cafeteria off its hinges. Electric light spasmodically flashes, and bulbs crash in blue and white, exploding as their fuses are overridden. The light winks off the kerosene-filmed floor and makes the room like an ice rink – the pyromaniac's face and body are illuminated, and I want to reach out, to seize him by the back of his shirt and drag him after me, because in the air, hovering a metre or so off the ground, is a dark phantom shape. I collapse to the ground and cower behind the door, pulling it almost-shut, my fingers clinging to the handle as the great impossible wind tears around us, makes the pyromaniac's one-piece ripple like pale water. The figure, a creature or a man or neither, bleeds darkness from its skeletal shape and elongated limbs, the drawn-out fingers and arms, the slack jaw and empty eye sockets. Its eyes sear white-hot, as if having swallowed all the electricity in the room, two bright searchlights rendering the burnt man immovable. Then the ghostly figure swoops down like a bird of prey and snatches him up in its talons, dragging him directly upwards and pummelling his fragile body against the wall. I can see only his feet, see him kicking out, but the creature has a hold on him, and his breath wheezes out in a rasping cry for help. I can't move. I can't breathe.  
Another agonised, ear-rending cry and something red and dark and wet falls sopping to the ground – insides, skin, a part of him? I involuntarily scream something and the pyromaniac is lamenting in broken syllables, in his hopelessness, yelling not like a man but like a dog being kicked in the gutter.  
“I wanted to burn it! I wanted to burn it all! There's no other way to erase what you've done, Blair – you can't escape yourself-” The words slur into unintelligible shrieks and I can't watch any more, as his body is dropped like a broken ceramic doll, as the dark creature in its robes like dark river water turns in the air, so inevitable, and I can tell it's looking for me. It heard me screaming.  
I turn and run, adrenaline carrying me on my punctured leg, into the darkness of another room filled with cardboard boxes, then I slam another door open and I'm in a mesh-fenced compound with groaning patients keening and grumbling and rubbing their faces against the fences. I career past, knocking one over, and he falls like a skittle to the ground, rolling on his back in the concrete. There's a lock on the exit door of the compound and I try it, shake it, only to no avail, the rain-slick metal not giving at all. My breath comes silver and clouding on the air. The cold sets in my bones. Rainwater splashes up my legs in puddles, the trees drip it like saliva. I clamber over a trash-can and piled-up boxes and then haul myself over the fence, standing over the barbed coils and picking them away from catching my one-piece. I didn't look before I climbed up, and now my legs are stuck, one prickled coil digging into my ankle like a nettle. The black creature is making noises like TV static, and I can practically feel its presence chilling the air as it coasts predatorily out into the fenced courtyard. Some of the patients groan, one of them slams his head against the mesh. I turn and see the dark shape, the bright white wolf eyes, and I yank my leg free with a grunt and place my feet in the mesh and make myself climb down. I nearly – nearly, but not quite – lose my grip on the mesh, but then I let myself drop, crying out as I land on my lame leg, but continue on, turning and ripping away into the grounds.  
Mud, sopping wet, between my toes and making me grimace. There're street-lamps in this near-desolation, but I dodge their small pockets of gold and amber light, skirting in the inky dark, passing a water feature filled instead with blood and several men in various states of dismemberment. The sound of the creature dims, and I slow to a walk, crouching behind the water feature and then sitting on the path with my elbows propped on the side of the pool. I wait, not knowing if it's getting closer or if it's moving away, but the silence soothes me somewhat. The head of a man is open and smiling, eyes manic, bobbing in the shallow river, and I choke out laughter, putting my hand over my mouth.  
I poke the head and watch it coast away.  
“Best bath-toy ever.” I mumble, then the words fall flat and I stare blankly at the dark substance. It could so easily be water, I think, except I can smell the iron in the blood, can feel it on my tongue, the tang of metal. It doesn't disturb me. I let my head drop into my arms and see the sliver of golden light over his face, and I tell myself not to call him the pyromaniac, because the name does not fit. He could have set alight to the cafeteria, to the whole goddamn hospital, but he didn't. I realise that, from the rooftop, the golden glow I saw must have been him trying to light a fire. I was drawn to the light, to the colour, without even knowing it. Perhaps Gluskin thwarted his attempt to let the fire catch, by turning on sprinklers, or perhaps the rain stopped the flames from really catching. If the burnt man hadn't met me, would the building be in flames? He said that my presence, Jess' presence, stopped him. I suppose he must have thought this place was a lost cause, and that it would be a mercy to kill them all. Seeing small signs of hope, like Jess staggering screaming but sane through the corridors, must have felt bizarre. He had so delicately planned the funeral of Mount Massive only for his plans to be turned on their head. And now, he will not breathe again. The tears roll hot and fat down my face and I wipe my eyes on my arm, then rub them hard with the heel of my dirty hands, sniffing and stifling disgusting noises ebbing in my throat. I want to re-enter the building, to find his body as if he were sleeping, and bury him somewhere amongst the cool wetness of the woods, between some dark wood-smelling trees, in the earth.  
I could set fire to his clothes and hair and have all his words and kindness spiral up out of this place as smoke. But there is little beauty in death. I remember his organs, so clinical and functional, on the floor. When you undo the seam of the body and let the insides be taken out, examined, life as a concept, as an understanding, seems infantile. Almost fictional. A body is animated by light for a certain time. Then the light passes through.  
I'm reminded of my room at home and how the sun reaches the point in the sky, just behind the apple tree with its canker and its blossoms, so that light pours in through the windows and makes rectangles across the floor. It only happens for a couple of hours every day, then it passes – the rectangles of light are on the floor, then the wall, then the ceiling. Then gone.  
I walk numbly around the small part of the grounds looking for something to do that would be significant, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I know I'm losing it. I should be conserving my energy, finding food and fresh water, and following his instructions, but I can't let the image of him go. I try to rename him in my mind.  
“Aiden. It means 'little fire'.” I say to myself as I straighten up from searching the wet grass for a captivating object, holding a purplish thistle. I'm going to set it somewhere and burn it, as his body should have been cremated. “I'll remember you as Aiden.” I hold the thistle by the stalk in my hand, clench it, and continue walking, the dawn stretching its blue maw over the horizon. The sky behind the Church is laced by wet green and yellow, and I travel towards where the crucifixes meet the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved writing Pyro, but I didn't want him to hang around for so long that I got sick of writing him - I like the idea of him dying a martyr because realistically I feel he's too kindhearted to survive in Mount Massive until the end. I'm very excited to write Trager, because he makes me laugh.  
> Eddie will be back soon, I'm just waiting for the right moment for him to appear. 
> 
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finds Jess.
> 
> (TW for sexual content and gore)

The Church is lit from within. Candles hang their small beads of flame on the air and the night is cool through the busted windows, the stained glass punched through by violence and a fallen sapling or two from the force of the storm. Sunlight slowly illuminates the shards of glass like the wrappers of boiled sweets. I walk slowly through the open double doors of mahogany. The interior is Gothic, perhaps seventeenth century, with three large arched windows like open mouths that let the wind billow in – I can envision the effigies of Peter and Paul and Christ that would have been etched into the coloured glass, all benevolent faces and elegant profiles. But the glass is gone, scattered in claret and cerulean and bile-yellow fractals over the altar. Standing at the end of the room with the aisle before me, I'm reminded of Gluskin and his drawings of wedding dresses, the opulent garments on hangers in the shower rimed with dirt. I hear my own footsteps echo off the high walls, resounding like the interior of a cave, the sound of my scuffling limp returned to me. Morning-light falling through the black fingers of trees and the remains of stained glass windows like the tiny, brittle bones in a bat's wing.  
I feel emotion stir in me as I take a match at the alter and light the candles in their little metal holsters and on their gaunt, silver candelabras. The old wax is reanimated like a wan corpse, flushed with warm orange, grinning with the colour of the flame, dripping warm and oozing down the length of the candles. For a reason I can't discern, I prod at the hot wax with my finger and hiss as it burns me – it looked so soft, almost like velvet, and I wanted to touch it. Even though I knew it would burn me. Then the thistle in my cold, stiff fingers is in front of me and I push its spiked lilac head into the flame, letting the crackling yellow and white swallow it up, guzzling it. I place it down inside a bronze bowl, probably used for baptism water, and sit cross-legged on the ground before the alter, watching the pockets of flame burp and gulp as they consume the thistle. It's what he would have wanted, I suppose. I realise it's ridiculous, to care to much so quickly for a stranger in a hospital. But hospitals have that effect on you – you are aware of your own mortality. You can have a quick conversation with the man in the bed next to you, and you can see the smile lines in his face, the greenish glow of sickness, and look at him as if you are starving for faces to see. Because a part of you is aware that you may be watching dying embers of a human life. You look at them and, in a hospital, you could fall in love. Life looks most beautiful when it's hiding in the medicine cabinets and under the beds.  
“Here comes the bride, here comes the bride...” A singing voice from behind me makes me start, fall back on my elbows. There's a man sitting several rows back, in the pews, his head in darkness. “She walks in the night... Or are those the wrong words? Oh. I don't know.” A droll laugh, and I lurch to seize one of the candelabras.  
“Don't move, or I'll burn the place to the ground.” I say. “I swear. I'll burn it all.”  
He raises his head and the sunlight glares off of two circular lenses, nearly blinding me. I stand with the candle clenched in my fist, then a gust of cold wind stirs my hair and blows out the small, guttering flame.  
“Well, there goes your threat, buddy. I almost feel sad for you.” He snickers. “I know who you are, and chances are you also know me. Now, don't look so surprised.” His voice is lilting, has a playful musicality to it – he sounds so overly friendly, so saccharine, that I grit my teeth and have to hold myself back from spouting angry, humiliated expletives. “I'm a well-known practitioner. Usually, I'd have you call my office and make an appointment, but it looks like I'll just have to do this job on the fly. Looks like you need me.” I can practically feel the eyes behind those lenses on my wounded leg. Two hands with skin like leather, like stretched brown sinew, fold themselves over the row of seats in front of him. The half-lit man looks as if he's been flayed, like smoked meat left out to dry. You could rap your knuckles against the shell-like skin.  
“I don't want trouble.” I murmur, exhausted. “Don't push me.” I bite down on my bottom lip to stop the words, all potential threats exhausted. I could not burn down a building. I could not kill a man. I've seen too much death.  
“Sure, of course not. Why don't you come sit down? Do you want to, uh... lament about God?” He say, and I don't move. “Come and rest your leg.”  
“I'm fine standing.”  
“Then at least come closer, so I can see you.” He retorts, not missing a beat, not giving me a moment to think. “Come on, just sit down. If I were going to kill you, I'd have already done so.” I move from where I stand at the alter, with its extinguished little flames all exhaling silver smoke into the red-raw dawn, and I move down the aisle, standing next to him in the pew, where he sits halfway down the glossy wooden bench. Sunlight winks off the mahogany and I realise the surface is wet. One glance to the ceiling reveals gaping openings beyond the rafters slimed with pigeon excrement, dripping with it in frozen white stalactites. Holes like moth-eaten gaps in clothes. The rain must have fallen in. Beyond the openings like wounds, there are the branches of trees, the jutting silhouettes like multiple points of articulation in long, entwined fingers. “You're a quiet one, aren't you?” He wheezes, and I jump in surprise.  
The light moves across the benches, the rich mahogany carpets with their Baroque swirls and florals, and I wish I could gasp as I saw him. I wish I was disturbed enough to turn and run, his appearance a precursor to his actions, but I merely look at him numbly. His spectacles with the multiple lenses, piled over and over – three on one eye, two on the other – reflect the light and show me tiny duplicates of a sky filled with trees and clouds. In the glass visor of his left eye, a crow labours into the air, screaming. Smaller lenses cluster around the sides of the heavy contraption like the eyes of a spider, and the thing – like a head-dress – is fixed to his head by metal. The sallow, brown leather skin of his cheeks is just visible above a dirty grey cloth tied over his mouth in a pantomime of a doctor's mask, and it's only then that my entire body visibly stills. I recall from my own past anaesthesia-distorted memories of spectacles on the face of a surgeon, the white mask concealing a mouth spilling medical jargon, and rubber gloves. None on his hands, but in his lap, a pair of black leather gloves like crumpled snakeskin lie over a dirt-mottled black apron. Like scrubs.  
A myriad of potential scenarios assault me – me seizing him by the shoulders and ramming him into the pews, yelling for Jess, taking his glasses and ripping them clean off his face, using the hard bronze nodules rimming the glass discs to beat his face in. Instead, I simply stand, shaking, my hands coiled into fists. I say nothing. I do nothing.  
“This place, here, used to be Father Martin's stinking theist hovel. But, I'll tell you something I really shouldn't,” Long brown finger waggled in my face, my breathing growing hard and hot, “I think the man might be... well, a little crazy.” A pause, and I can tell he is smiling. He knows. He doesn't even have to incline his head to show me he's watching my body poised for violence, my tension, and he knows exactly why. That single digit hovers in the air like a blue-bottle, then he withdraws it with lightning-fast motion. Slips on his gloves, waggles all the other long and crooked fingers. “I had a rather vehement disagreement with the man, and I came to apologise. I told him of epiphenomonalism, how God is as causally useless, if you will, as a train whistle is to the pistons and the smoke of a steam-train. Is there a God? Perhaps. But the great train that is life thunders on, drags people under its oiled wheels, careers off the tracks and commits all kinds of evil. God is no longer relevant. But, you see, we Doctors can usher in a new era of sterile peace, of anaesthetised thoughtlessness. Let me sell you the dream, let me change your face and your body so you can be happy. No thinking required. Yeah, Father Martin didn't quite agree with me.” He pauses again, this time at length, and I see his muscles working under the grey cloth, the smirk stretching. “Say, you're Gluskin's little bride, right?”  
“I'm not anyone's bride.” I spit contemptuously, and he tuts - actually tuts - shaking his head.  
“Now she speaks up.” He announces. “Will I have to constantly goad you to get you to speak? Hmm? Because that's going to be exhausting. Just ask me the question you wanna ask. Come here. Come in close and ask me.” He crooks his finger and humiliation burns my face. I sit down heavily, practically huffing under my breath, and the proximity of him makes my head spin, makes me woozy. He smells so strongly of blood and cleaning alcohol. I seize the pew in front of me for support as black fringes my vision, nausea nearly crippling. Bile in the back of my throat, vomit threatening to spasm onto the floor. I choke it back down.  
“You have my friend.” I say. “You took her. What have you done with her?” My voice fissures, and I stare straight ahead.  
“She's being treated.” He replies. My hands shake, my arms quail, and the rage nearly overcomes me.  
“For what?”  
“For humanity. Among other things. I'm going to make a few alterations, so I can make her perfect.” He shrugs a shoulder, and suddenly I can't physically restrain myself any longer, the blood burning so hot around me, making my hands itch for something to seize. I lash out with my left arm and claw at his face with one hand, rising out of my seat and bleeding my entire body weight into my nails on his skin, which is thick as vellum. I tear madly with both hands and hear his mangled, outraged scream – the light dances off the lenses as I try to rend them from his face, and I see myself reflected within them, red and pulsing and black-eyed. I'm snarling obscenities, threats, all prefixed by her name, by my best friend who I dragged down to hell with me. The tears burst forth and as I pummel him he responds, arms shooting out and closing my wrists underneath his gnarled fingers. He lifts me a little off the ground, and my knees knock against the seats of the pew, before he tosses me into the aisle and I collapse onto my side, coiling into a foetal ball with the daylight falling backward through the punched-through holes in the ceiling above me. The light illuminates dust that gushes from the carpets, spirals up burning gold, and I see Doctor Trager straighten up, pat down his filthy scrubs, and walk barefoot towards me. The gold winks off the glass and I struggle to right myself. My ears ring as if hornets are swarming about my head, and my lame leg drags along behind me as I struggle onto my knees. I feel him plant his foot on the back of my head, slowly, as if trying to evoke a reaction.  
“You want to make this harder for everybody, huh?” He growls, any pretence of false friendliness disappearing from his voice. “You want me to make threats?” His breath against my neck, my face, as he leans over and obscures the light. His shadow drags long and black along the aisle, the sun burning behind him, rising in yellow pallor over his shoulders. I turn over my shoulder to look and the foot leaves my head, stamps down on my arm instead, with enough force to make me writhe on the carpet and scream into its must-stinking surface.  
“Don't touch her!” I wail into the floor, and I feel his toes curl. “Don't you dare – I'll kill you!” Thrash again, only to have his hand clamp around my throat, under my chin, yoking my head back so I can hardly breathe. I choke and wheeze cries for help, fingernails scrabbling at his hand. His long, filth-rimed yellow fingernails cut into my lower lip, my cheeks, and he yanks even harder. My eyes spring with water and I rasp another breath.  
“Are you going to come with me?” He snaps. “Huh, buddy? What was that?”  
No. No, never. But my body is searing from tailbone to throat as he puts more weight into the gesture, my back arching, my abdominal stretching uncomfortably. Too far. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I am terrified that he's going to pull so hard he'll break my spine. So I nod fervently, tearing at his hand, yanking him away, and he sighs with relief, dragging me up onto my feet. The next few moments are a blur as he manhandles me by the head towards a side-door, and he wrenches it open with one hand, his shaking breath ghosting over my neck all the while.  
Behind the door is the forest, the open rolls of dark green hills and the inky clearing between the dense trees. Crows' songs crisp the cool morning air. There's a rickety, rusted wheelchair with leather straps for feet and wrists left lopsidedly on the grass, and he pushes me down into the contraption. I try to kick him but he delivers a sharp, crippling blow to the head – white static in my vision, crackling like popping candy, and my head is heavy on my chest. I feel the echoes of the strike rail down my spine, right through every bone. I'm lashed to the wheelchair and he begins to push, careering over the grass and wheeling the thing onto pavement, taking me round and round the blood-filled water feature from the last night. It is gaunt and sad in daylight, the limbs in the bright red wet looking pale and bluish. The Doctor crazily wheels left and right, humming to himself, then pushing along a straight stretch of concrete. Distantly, as if watching from the shadows between the trees, I almost want to laugh.  
“I prescribe fresh morning air for you.” He prods my shoulder and the wheelchair nearly capsizes. He pushes on, even more vehemently, grunting, “It might help with those... turbulent female hormones, making you lash out at the people who want to help you.” I can hear the smirk in the words, and I arch my back against the chair, testing my bonds. I rattle the leather cuffs around my wrists, trying to slip my hands back out, but to no avail.  
“I wasn't asking for a diagnosis.” I say.  
“The really sick ones never do.” 

He pushes on through dark corridors until we reach a network of wide rooms with gurneys all lined up, stripped down like skeletons in the cold, stark light from a single cluster of uncovered light-bulbs in the ceiling. He's breathing heavy, creaks the wheelchair to a stop, and by this point I have stopped struggling. I feel the weight of sleeplessness crawling underneath my skin, making my body feel like lead. Several moths batter their soft velvet wings against the bulbs and one of them is stung, exuding a little fizzing noise before fluttering like a leaf to the dark ground. I watch it, mouth slack, transfixed. The path of its fall leads my gaze to another gurney, at the very back of the room, standing occupied at the very edge of the circle of light flung out by the bulbs. A leg is extended, held in the air by a brace, and quiet mumblings echo off the walls.  
“I'm back!” Trager announces zealously, and the words make me grit my teeth. He approaches the gurney and kneels beside it, in the shadows, and the patient makes more noises. “You pleased to see me? Yeah. I thought so, buddy.” He stands up, turns to face me, then says, “I'd like you to meet somebody very special.” His long, gnarled fingers curl around the metal frame of the bed and he wheels it out, into the circle of light, so I can see the reposing figure of a person with their foot mutilated – several of the smaller toes are missing, nowhere to be seen. The wounds and the sheets are mostly clean, though the ankle is twisted at an awkward angle. I watch for a moment, then my head raises up from my sternum as I realise that the small foot, the supple little droop of the leg, the slim calf, cannot be that of a man. I crane my neck in my seat to see her face, and my stomach physically contorts.  
“Jess! Jess! It's me!” My hoarse voice rises and the bonds strain against my frantic struggling. I see her, her brown eyes narrowed against the bright light, the soft curve of her catlike mouth, her hair mussed and splayed out behind her. She does not look up. She does not move, and I continue to call out, my cries echoing off the walls. Trager is still, and I look to him and realise that her hand is a small phantom shape within his, the long brown fingers criss-crossing a cage over her skin. She practically glows in the light.  
“Why are you...?” My words die in my throat, and I feel myself leaning too far forward in the chair, so keen to see her, to hear her voice. I thrash forwards and the chair tips over, the floor spinning up to slap my face with its grime, the silver wheels spinning in the air, creaking and creaking like a disused playground toy. My cheek is on the cold ground, and I struggle on the floor, trying to look up, still calling her name, but there is no response. Trager regards her, on her back on the bed like an angel or a sea creature, suspended, then my slumped form like a shell-backed animal on the floor. “What's happened to her?” I ask him, and he watches me for another still moment, before laughing.  
“She's in recovery.” He replies, and his voice is markedly softer.  
“Her toes - I'll -”  
“What will you do? Huh?” He snaps suddenly, gently setting down her hand and coming to stand over me, blocking out the eye-watering light from the bulbs. “What will you do?” His foot moves to press into my cheek, smearing dirt across my face. I try to move away, but he is carving a path with his long, dirty toenails towards my mouth. I choke back a sob as he presses the filthy sole of his foot to my lips. “Hmm?”  
A garbled noise from behind my mouth. I try to pull my head away but the wheelchair's back is jutting into the back of my neck, pinning me to the ground. I lie prostrate with his foot grinding filth into my face, until he withdraws it and I breathe heavily.  
“Nothing? Just as I thought. This is your friend, right? As far as I understand it, and this is just word of mouth, mind you, she had absolutely nothing to do with your unfortunate mix-up several months ago. That was all you. You got out of Blair's hell, went home, and obviously one trip here wasn't enough for you, was it?” He grinds the words out from between his teeth. “Well, I hope everybody has given you a warm welcome.”  
“Stop it.” I grumble from the ground. “You – you're sick! You cut off her toes!” I bellow into the wet ground, but I've run out of tears. Humiliation swells up inside me, and I'm rocking my face against the floor, smacking my forehead against the tiles as hard as I can just for relief, just for some kind of exertion, my hands and legs rendered completely useless.  
“I'm going to remodel her.” He says. “From the bottom up. She's going to be perfect for me.”  
“I don't understand what you mean.”  
“There are some nice parts I've collected from other patients – I've been waiting for a suitable subject to use them on, and she is just right. A blank canvas. She also laughs at my jokes, which goes a long way – you'll do good to remember that in your time here. You see, because you didn't book a consultation meeting, you won't exactly have the gold standard accommodation, but I'm a flexible man. So, get the fuck up. Get your face out of the shit on the floor, and we'll sort you out. Then you can sit tight and observe a professional at work – do you want a notepad and pen? You might want to jot a few things down, medical jargon and the like.” A pause. “No? Then I'll get this show on the road.”  
He leers over me and roughly drags the wheelchair upright, loosening the wrist restrains enough to yank my hands free, and he clasps two of my wrists within one of his hands, using the other to free my ankles. Any plans of escape, any adrenaline, is shocked out of me, and I merely stand and watch Jess's impassive, pale face as Trager drags me toward a metre-by-metre iron-barred cage in a particularly drab corner of the room. He kicks the door open with his foot, then winds me with his fist so I'm doubled over and shoves me inside. The door is slammed shut and locked deftly before I even have time to lunge for him. Instead, I crouch on the iron bars beneath me and peer out into the centre of the room, where the circle of light begins to gutter.

Time passes, but the lack of windows eludes nothing to the state of the weather, the colour of the sky. The hands on the clock are missing in my mind and I stare numbly at the same spot on the wall until all the moths have dispersed around the room, crawling the walls in their soft brown suits of velvet, somehow aware of their dead companion on the floor. One settles on my finger and I remain completely still, scarcely breathing, just watching its little legs as it moves, the soft hairs on the back of its painted wings. The tiny life fascinates me. My ears are poised for small sounds, expecting Trager to return at any moment. He left to search for supplies, and it is as if the room itself is holding its breath with anticipation for his return.  
“Jess.” I murmur for the umpteenth time, only to receive no response. “Jess." Silence. "You're in there somewhere. I don't care how many drugs he's put you on – I know you can hear me. You're probably incredibly angry. Pissed, in fact. You're probably talking about Noah in Atlanta, all the waves you're going to surf with him later on in the summer, or... I don't know, how your car insurance is astronomical and you want to paint the outside yourself but your dad won't let you.” When my voice stops, the moth takes off, and it is as if all the life were gone from the world. This brown, lifeless room and the single source of light in it, illuminating somebody who is gone from their body. “Talk to me. Talk about the cat. Talk about coursework and what colour you want to dye my hair. Yell at me for not washing up. Berate me, tell me off, tell me something that will upset me – I don't fucking care, just say something.” I mumble, my chin propped on the horizontal bar that intersects the two flanking my face. I let my temple rest on one of the bars, and I watch her, her dark eyelashes curled on her cheeks. “I miss you.” Another moth kisses the light-bulb and dies. “I'm sorry.”  
With the sun blocked out, the rise and fall of her chest has become my sundial. The light sounds off her cheeks and I realise how sallow her face looks, the depth of the eye sockets. I want to scream. I want to rip the door off its hinges and run to her, sit on the edge of the bed and put my face in her neck and smell our detergent and the coffee from our favourite on-campus spot. I imagine that I'm sat there, with my hand on hers like Trager made a pantomime of, and have her know that I'm still trying. But instead I merely lean my head on the bars and find myself lulled into shallow, murky sleep by the rhythm of her breathing, her presence itself letting my mind turn still. In my final moments of waking I realise how personal sleep is, and how I haven't once fallen asleep inside this hospital without the aid of drugs or battering – when we choose to fall asleep, we are choosing to let the veil of perception fall down around us. We are popping our own bubble we use to block society out. We are forgetting that we are separate from the ground and the light and all the things in between. I've fallen asleep to the smell of her, the sound of her breathing, so many times that I feel my body crumble into the cold floor, curled like a dying autumn leaf. 

She speaks. I slur out of the dark numbness of sleep and mumble in my throat. My temple is against the hard, cold bars on the floor. My body feels ensconced in my own warmth, groggy and small. I surfaced from a dream of nothing in particular, just a mesh of soft colours and sensations – I cling to the feeling of sleep with my mind, trying to pull the covers back over me, trying to block out the dark beetle-shell skin of Trager as he leans over her bed. Had he not been standing there, his face close to hers, I could have done it, I could have lapsed back into resting, into the soft whorled place between waking and dreaming. But my eyes are fixed wide and I can't stop watching. Jess's mouth is open and she speaks to him, her fingers clumsily tracing his face, the glass of his spectacles. Her pupils are shrunk pinpricks in the circle of light, and I can almost strain myself to see from here the dashes of auburn and red and amber in the brown rind of her irises. Her words fall upon me like water, carrying weight but making no sense, until I raise my head and the soft privacy of sleep snaps shut behind me like leaving a room.  
He is touching her face with his fingers and I want to be sick. My mouth is open and my face pressed to the bars, and all the while I carry with me the feeling of disgust, of voyeurism, like I am trapped – invisible, but helplessly witnessing, the sexual foreplay of two animals or a couple tangled in the corner seats on the subway.  
“Jess.” I croak, and Trager turns his face around in less than a second. I steel myself for a blow, crouched on my hands and knees.  
“I see you're up, buddy.” He hisses with contempt. “I'm sorry, did we wake you?” We. We. How dare he? I fantasise about tearing across the room and bowling him to the floor, taking out his legs and driving my fists into him.  
“No. It's fine.” I grind out each word and he gives a contented, if not sardonic, noise of acknowledgement. Then he turns back to her, kneeling at her bedside, and the tips of his fingers, like pork crackling or charred meat, peel back the off-white cotton of her makeshift hospital robe. He curls the fabric back only slightly, dragging one long fingernail across her collarbone, and my eyes flit between her face and his roaming hand, horrified. Her lips are parted and her eyes are fogged with a drugged semi-sleep and her face betrays a quiet kind of ecstasy I've never seen contort her features before.  
“Will you tell me the story,” She murmurs, and her voice drives a splint into my gut. Us in the car, having coffee, her fingers in my hair, all the times when we had just met and I had been a hairs breadth away from falling in love with her, replay at the sound of her voice - “About the girl who married a tiger dressed as a man?” I look away and concentrate on the ground.  
“That one?” He asks, voice soft, rasping, enough to make my skin crawl as if insects were breeding inside me. “I've told you it so many times; are you sure?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Alright, then. Alright...” A glance back towards them shows me his hand continuing to drag down the front of the hospital robe, until the soft cleft between her underarm and her chest is illuminated. Her clavicle pools with shadow, and I can see now the severe weight loss, her protruding bones. I shouldn't watch, and I don't want to, so many parts of me screaming in denial, trying to pretend that this is not happening. But I'm fixated. “...There was a girl born in December. She lived in Russia, in the snow, where everything was glacial and cold, with only her father for company. But he was a bad man, he gambled, he drank. She grew up beautiful. The kind of beauty like broken ice, something you know is going to hurt you if you press your finger into it, not from sharp edges but from coldness. She was so cold that you would just stick.” He laughs, drowning his words. “I'm telling it all wrong, but...” The hand travelled lower. “...Eventually, her father had gambled away nearly all their money, so they had to move away. They travelled for months, close to a year, living on little until they reached India. Hot summers. Russian men rarely fared well there, not due to the climate, but due to the Beast that had a tyrannical rule over the land. They discovered that the price of living in his kingdom, was to play the Beast at cards.”  
She murmurs under her breath, exhales words that sound like, “But her father was a terrible gambler. He bargained with everything, lost everything, until he lost her as well. He lost her to the Beast at cards.”  
“Exactly.” He replies. “The Beast wore an ivory mask painted with a man's face, and gloves, but he had the smell not belonging to a man, but to the musk of an animal.”  
“A tiger.”  
“There are many men like that. Got to be careful who you fall for.” He says, mostly to himself. “And who you play at cards.” He grows tired of retelling the story, more occupied with her, tracing his hand over her chest, her stomach, pushing back the gown until her breasts are in the light. I become fully aware of the situation as he begins to touch her with his gnarled, brown skin, and I hurl myself against the bars of the cage.  
“Don't!” My shoulder on the metal, trying to barge the door open. He doesn't move to turn around, merely continues his path across her body, her fair skin nearly glowing in the light. The soft hum of the moths grows louder in my ears as I hear everything, see everything, in the room, painfully aware of each tiny detail, the moths throwing themselves into the electric current and dying from the single kiss. Trager's hand disappears under the gown, away from my gaze, past her hips, and I watch as Jess exhales, arches her back against the mattress. I can practically feel his fingers inside her.  
“The girl was held prisoner by the Beast for some time.” He continues, and I pace the cage around me, lash against the metal, all the while crying as she writhes on the bed, panting. “There's something the narrator mentioned – they said, the world is run by men, and it's these men of so-called religion, of academia, that see women as less than themselves. Without souls. Like animals. Like the Beast, forgotten by society. The Beast tells the girl he'll let her go, if she'll only let him see her naked, and – eventually – she does so. But she decides not to leave, because when she takes off her clothes, she finds she can also take off her skin. And, underneath, she is a tiger. Just like he is.” Her noises fill the room, escalating from distracted humming to cries ripped raw from her throat. Her cheeks, mouth, chest are all flushed with arousal and I can hear my own pulse thunder in my ears. The Doctor, seeming suddenly impassioned, presses his head into the place between her neck and her shoulder, hissing things that I can't make sense of. I realise that I'm holding back tears.  
He wraps his other arm around her throat, raking his nails along her jugular until he begins to draw blood, and the cries become howls that make the walls shake. I'm screaming for him to stop. He's going to tear her to ribbons with his fingernails. He's going to make her bleed out while she orgasms. She frantically mumbles to him, and then I realise that the walls are not shaking because of her, but because of footfalls resounding in the corridor outside. I wheel about, hearing somebody running, bolting, towards the room, and see that Trager is too immersed to realise. Then the door bursts open, wailing on its hinges, and the broad-shouldered figure of Eddie Gluskin races into the room.  
In less than a moment, he seizes Trager by the head and coils an arm around his throat, provoking strangled gibbering, Trager's arms lashing out with their clawed tips for Jess. She stills on the mattress, hair sweat-dampened and splayed across her, mouth agape and chest heaving, shocked out of the drug-induced stupor by the violence of the scene. Gluskin pulls him along behind him, towards a rusted silver table adorned with medical instruments in various states of disuse, and seizes a pair of long-bladed scissors. They are not the kind of scissors used for cutting stitches, or for medicinal purposes, but more resembling the clippers used to trim a hedge. The tips of the blades are dented and warped from being repetitiously used. Lit from behind by the circle of artificial light, his hair sleek and dark, clothes dirty and patched-up multiple times, Gluskin experimentally brings the two blades together with a metallic keening noise. Jess begins to cry out, struggling to sit up, and my eyes fly to her, panicked. Gluskin looks over his shoulder towards her, just once, and the light catches his blue eyes, before he applies the open jaw of the scissors to the Doctor's throat, and with one great effort the blades slash through the windpipe. Dark blood spatters through the air and onto the ground in a great arc, shuddering with his pulse, and he croaks and burbles wet noises in death. Jess continues to cry as Gluskin lowers the body to the ground, spent of blood, emptying itself as it pales against the tiles. He breathes out softly, flexing his shoulders, and his eyes are ice-pale in the light. I watch as the last moth kisses the lightbulb and dies in the air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably a very long chapter - if it's too long, go ahead and tell me so I can make these installments shorter. I just felt like I had a lot I wanted to convey, and I'd lose the excitement if I split the scene up. This is without a doubt the most bizarre sexual encounter I've ever written, and I hate to admit that I kind of enjoyed it.  
> Sadly, Trager's short appearance is over, but I had a blast writing his dialogue (probably too much of a blast.)  
> And I'm super psyched to write Eddie again.
> 
> For those interested, the story Trager tells is 'The Tiger's Bride' by Angela Carter.  
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A kiss.
> 
> (TW for mentions of self-harm and explicit descriptions of gore)

His great body moves slowly over to me, and I crouch like a quivering, rabid animal in the cage, my hands gnarled into pale fists on the ground. He kneels before me, and Jess's voice, her bereft noises, echo from wall to wall. Gluskin's broad shoulders blot out the guttering light of the bulb and I'm covered in his shadow, my lip peeled back from my teeth like a dog snarling on its haunches. His pale blue eyes bite into me through the gloom, then his hand, cloaked in its fingerless black glove, comes to stroke across the bars. His fingers rest between the iron and he reaches inside for me. I grunt and scurry into a far corner, glowering up at him.  
“Don't touch me.” I grind out between wooly teeth. His gaze is soft and burning, trying to speak quiet words to me, trying to tell me about the velvet black surface of the summer lake, the flies that darted over it, his father's face pushed hot and panting against the back of his young neck.   
“You're still alive.” He utters after a moment or two, and the reverence of the words momentarily astounds me. “How is that?” His eyes glaze over me, glistening and dark-socketed and ravenous, to observe my injured leg. “You must be an angel, to have survived that. To have got all the way here. I heard you fall. I saw it from the roof.”  
“Don't hurt my friend. Please. Don't hurt her.” My breathing hitches to panicked gasps as her cries grow dimmer, tiredly becoming choked sobs and pathetic mewling. I glance quickly to the bed to see her face screwed up in a spasmodic grimace, flushed and red, her throat boasting the pink abrasions from her dead captor's claws. “I – I-” The words snag in my throat like a stuttering sewing machine gagging on its own bobbin and thread, and suddenly I'm keeled over on the floor, crying hard into my own lap, into the grimy, piss-stinking iron bars. Breathing hard, my eyes bug wide open, air pulled in and gushed out in rapid motions, my face buried in my hands.   
I hear the cage door being wrenched open, and two hands come to rest heavily on my shoulders. I slur something unintelligible in anger, lurching away from Gluskin's hands, but my body is shaking so violently that I feel as if I'm spinning out of control, losing my fulcrum of balance, a car careering off the road. I reach out and grab his wrist as if he were a life-line.  
“Darling.” He says softly, the single word hemmed with confusion, concern, humanity that is so jarring with his animalistic slaughter only a minute ago. I've seen too much death. My vision is fringed with black.   
“Help – me-” The words are dislocated from any logical thought, my brain fumbling for support, and his hands take my upper arms and half-drag me out of the cage. My face touches something warm and frayed, peppered with stitches, and I realise from very far away inside my own convulsing body that I'm lying on his lap with my head on his leg. Like a stray dog. Like a child. His fingers find mine somehow and his breath is hot, forgotten, at the nape of my neck with its smell of musk and whiskey and spices. His scarred hands are close to my face, hovering with my own pale and crooked fingers intermingled with his. The scars cut soft, silver ravines like canals into the inside of his wrists, his palms. My red hair touches the tips of his fingers and he idly moves his fingertips against it, as if contemplating to tangle the digits into the snarled mess.   
“What's happening?” He asks, and his chest resonates with the baritone of his voice. I'm too close to him. I'm far too close. I settle my breathing and feel as if surfacing from a dream only to find myself a second from falling out of bed. I jerk into an upright position, moving myself away from the disturbing warmth of his body, from the tapered hands and fingers flecked with silver and lilac scars. I lean back to sit on my knees and pant heavily, flushed, terrified, the one-piece sliding off my shoulder. He watches me, his hands still open, palm-up, in my lap from where he held me. I feel ridiculous. I feel as if I've drunk too many plastic cups of liquor and coke and started talking dirty to a close friend in the hallway of somebody's house party. Shame licks my insides with its flames and I move away from his questioning eyes gleaming in the scarce light.  
“I couldn't breathe.” I state, rising to my feet. “I had a panic attack.”  
“Are you quite alright?” He remains kneeling on the ground, hunched over, his mouth slightly parted, those upward-tilting lips almost laughing at me with their constant look of invitation. This place is going to tear me apart from the inside out. These rotting walls make you fall in love with monsters, and Jess is living proof of that.   
“Yes.” A pause as I move to her bedside, into the circle of pale light. “Thank you.” The words are hard to regurgitate, and I turn my back to him to escape the blue barbs of those eyes. I feel the heat of his body, the distinct smell, the soft underside of his hands like the velvet on a horse's nose, make my skin prickle as if touched by a phantom. I can feel him watching me intently, curiously. I meet my best friend's eyes then place my hand in her slightly greenish one, as if to remove myself of the feel of Gluskin like a bad taste left in my mouth.   
“Jess.” I murmur, and her foggy eyes look at me. Her head turns with the quiet rustle of her hair. “It's me. It's me – everything will be okay.”  
Her mouth hangs open and her face flickers with dim, drug-numbed recognition. I can practically feel her stumbling in the dark of her memories, wading through the painkillers, to try to reach me. I wait for her to swim up to the surface of the brown eyes and return to me. I give her hand a squeeze.  
“That man, the Doctor, he didn't love you. I'm sorry. He didn't. Don't even think about him.” I whisper, wanting these words to be just ours, not his, not for Gluskin's ears. “He drugged you and made you think you needed him, but you don't. Look at me. Speak to me – please. Jess.”  
“I'm dead.” She says, finally, falteringly. Her parted lips, veined with bloodless purple and blue, dry and wrinkled like a slice of dried fruit, let the words spill out. “I must be dead.”  
“You're not. You're here, you're alive, and you've survived this.” I must be hurting her hand with how hard I'm squeezing it. I see the pink grazes on her throat up close, and find myself pressing a hand to them, trying to soothe them. My heart aches and I want to rip it right out of my chest and spare myself the pain of seeing her like this.  
“You're dead, Joan. He told me. You were killed by the man you wanted to save.” She says numbly, hopeless. I shake my head, but she continues. “I'm in hell with you. And that's good. I'm glad I get to see you.”  
“Stop it. Please, stop it.” I bite my lip and try to stifle the sobs rising in my chest like wild horses.   
“I thought I'd never see you again. I can't – I can't touch anything. I can't feel anything. Everything I eat tastes bad. Everything looks bad. I want to go back to how it was. Your cat. You and me in the kitchen.” She takes a breath. “God, you look so real.” Her chest begins to rise and fall faster, and fear blooms in my, consumes me from every finger to toe, every inch of my chest and stomach. She's going to die. The brown eyes with their fiery flecks of red and amber and chestnut like smouldering logs are screened by drugs, and now bead with tears that fall back from the corner of her eyes, matting her black eyelashes and getting caught in her hair.   
“Hey. Stay here with me.” My whispers growing dimmer, growing more ardent and desperate. “I need you to speak to me. I need you. I need-”  
“Kiss me.” She mouths brokenly.   
“What?”  
“Kiss me. Please.” She tilts her head back and my eyes fall to her lips again, the plump bottom one she rolls between her teeth during lectures, when she's concentrating, and the defined cupid's bow of the smaller upper lip. There had been times when I had danced with her and put my mouth to her neck, breathed her in, and knew I traced a line between the closest friendship and the subtlest love affair. It could have tippled over like a tap running for too long, and it could have done so easily. My fingers in her hair, trace the soft shell of her ear with its texture like the side of a ripe peach. My thumb rests on her cheekbone.   
“Really?”  
She's watching my mouth as I speak. I know that she loves me. I plant my elbows on the mattress either side of her, hovering over her face, my own hair mingling with hers as I rest the tip of my nose on hers. My figure casts a shadow over her, and the light of the bulb is cut out, leaving her freckles prominent, the slight kink in the bridge of her nose visible. I press my lips to hers and brown hair tangles with red hair, my hand supporting the back of her warm neck, my entire body thrumming with her rabbit pulse. She hardly kisses back at first, and I wonder what makes her like this, so able to enjoy the physical company of everyone around her. She had always been this way, but her situation, her Stockholm Syndrome with the Doctor, her desire to see me, must have culminated in the desire to be kissed. For someone to touch her and, unlike Trager, really mean the words that their mouth and fingers insinuated. I knew in that moment that this was not the beginning of a love affair – we were both beyond that, too close to take such a risk – but an affirmation that I would be there for her, that I was overwhelmed she was even alive, that I did love her.   
She arches her back and tilts her mouth further into mine, moving to kiss my cheek, lifting a hand to cup my face. Her breath on me is so familiar I almost fall into it.   
“Don't leave me.” She says, and I press my face into the soft hollow like a meadow, like a pool, between her neck and her clavicle.   
I don't have to answer, because she knows I won't.   
Like a dog in the corner, I can feel his pale eyes settling like insects on the back of my neck. She slurs back into a half-sleep, her eyelids semi-closed, her fingers still knotted with mine. My skin on her skin, like cream and coffee. Her tan looks almost green in the light. I hear him shift, the stretched fabric of his clothes making noises. In truth, I had nearly forgotten he was here.  
“Can you pick her up, please?” I ask throatily, afraid to turn and look at him.   
“Yes.” He responds after several seconds of deliberation, or of trying to coax his throat into releasing words. The sound is soft, like the furred shoulders of a moth, and disturbs me just as much as the little brown silhouettes of the creatures in flight. I could laugh at him having watched us kiss – I would usually revel in his discomfort – but all the humour is shaken out of me. His shadow stretches over her face, and she drops my hand slowly as his arms curl around the soft line of her back. The hospital robes hitch up a little around the middle, and he holds her in his arms with such ease that, from where I crouch, she looks like a doll with all the limbs slack and out of place. Her legs bounce where he has the crook of his arm under her knees, and her head falls back. I catch it in my hands before she has the chance to strain her neck, and in the darkness his eyes meet mine again. They look wet, and I look away, frowning deeply. He opens his mouth to ask a question, but it never comes.

We walk in relative silence. The corridors are open maws around us, and I stretch my limbs from their confines in the cage. Dawn rises bloody again over the trees, and the warm light illuminates the raised lines over Jess's jugular. A throat I kissed once, when our breaths smelled like amaretto sours and fogged in the cold air, now torn to ribbons. It could have been at a party only last week, but it feels like an event from years ago, swamped under the land-slide of other memories. Of sewing machines with white glinting teeth, of saws, of the sounds from her mouth.  
I trawl behind Gluskin, dragging my foot as my leg thrums with the constant pain. I make a small noise of discomfort and he turns his head, his noble profile unnervingly leonine, to look at me.   
“You...” He begins, and I can feel myself glowering. “You didn't stay.”  
My chest feels crushed between strong hands as I recall the dizzying height of the roof, the opulent dresses, the rime of dirt in the showers. Then the sickening whirl in my stomach as I lose my footing, as I rend the air with my body. Splice my calf like cracking an egg and watching the yolk slump over the side of the bowl. I pace behind him, averting my gaze to a succession of little oil paintings hung along this corridor. Words rear like bile and I choose them carefully, trying to guess his potential reaction. But as I continue walking, there's something about the paintings – the dark, swept hair, the close-set cobalt eyes, that makes me ask, “Are those paintings of the Blair family?”   
He takes a moment to respond, humming affirmation. “Those? I suppose. I've seen them only twice before. I never used to come here. It's the, uh, ward for physical maladies. The patients who would scratch themselves or use razor blades to cut their wrists.”  
“Oh.”   
“I wasn't one of them.” The photograph of his mother and her sharp-featured, faded beauty comes to mind, how it rested between my fingers. Her smile.  
“No, you preferred to hurt others.” I say before I can stop myself, and the words are sour. He flinches. His shoulders quiver a little.   
“What are you trying to say?” He say, and I huff and chew on my bottom lip, the ache in my leg gnawing at my shattered patience. The Gothic arches of the windows blot the swollen sunlight into shapes like tear-drops, crossing over his back like a liquid or thin fabric. Gold and gold and then shadow.   
“Nothing.” I mumble.   
“What did you look at, in that room?” He sounds somewhere between agitated and fearful.   
“It doesn't matter.” I say, my heart thrumming blood around me double-time. I couldn't take him on now, not with the leg and my exhaustion. “You were saying, about the paintings.”  
“The Blair family have owned this land for a long time. I forget how long, but it goes several generations back.” He says, and the silk in his voice returns, the baritone calm. My palms sweat and I wipe them on my overalls. “It was probably Jeremy Blair's great-grandfather's few acres. They cleared it out for the hospital, which was erected in the early 20th Century. Became a war hospital. And again, in the 1940's, it housed dying soldiers and the nurses who tried to keep them alive. But the Blairs had nothing to do with the conduct within the Hospital until a short while ago.”  
“How does that happen?” I say, and he makes an enquiring little noise.   
“What do you mean, exactly?”  
“If they owned the land, they should know what is done with it.”  
“Oh, it was business. Another company ran the Hospital itself – it must have been some sort of joint venture. The Murkoff Corporation came later.” He sighs, and the sound is so resonant I can feel it in my throat.   
“When?”   
“Late 70's. If you reference further back in time, many of the people working for Murkoff have a history in the Second World War. They left the hospital for a while. Now there's a resurgence in the program.” He pauses, the side of his cheek lifting in a grimace. “You don't want to know the kinds of things these men did.”  
“I think I already do.” I say, and he makes a clicking noise with his tongue, seemingly affronted.  
“Ladies shouldn't know about such... disturbing things.” And he says the words with utmost seriousness. I'm glad Jess is out of it with her mouth ajar, head rolled into his shoulder, because if she'd heard the words she would have leapt out of his arms and given him a battering.   
Instead, I snort laughter. “Okay.”  
“Atomic particle research, primarily. Among other things.” He supplies.  
“You're referring to the experiments in the concentration camps, aren't you?” I retort, and he stops in his tracks, turns around to face me. The pale eyes set deep into his face dart all over me, searching for something I can't name. The corner of his mouth twitches, and his gaze momentarily rests on my lips. I suddenly feel naked. “I researched before deciding to work here. I know about the history of some members, but only vague outlines. Links to experiments, like the ones on the Roma people – they made synthetic twins, altering body parts of siblings so they looked the same. They would torture one twin and see if the other felt the pain – all kinds of gross torture porn.” The term suffices to make him cringe. “They used to sew twins together to try and make one person.”  
“That's enough.” He barks, and I jerk. “No more of that.”  
After several minutes of walking in silence, I probe; “What do you think Murkoff are doing here? With the Morphogenic engine?”  
He diverts the question with his silence, instead watching the sunrise and walking at a leisurely pace. Instead of watching the sun, I watch him. 

There's a courtyard that he finds by nightfall, after several stops to garner resources. I walk with a morphine-stinking knapsack slung over one shoulder, feeling cans chime and grate against my hip in a hypnotising melody. We walk in relative silence, eat with little eye contact, and I can tell that any semblance of a conversation between he and I is officially closed. I'm told to keep up more than once, caught trying to make a moth walk onto my finger, or lingering too long next to a ruptured corpse dragged under an office desk. I begin to feel the different temperatures, breezes, scents of each hospital wing work their way into my physicality like wrinkles, and I drink in everything voraciously. I pry a small, red-handled axe off a bracket on a wall next to a fire alarm and hold it in my hand, swinging it just for the pleasure of feeling a dangerous weight. Jess swims in and out of consciousness, and as I sit in the room by the courtyard, coaxing her into a waking state so she can eat, I watch her swinging feet and the two missing toes on her right foot. Gluskin glances between her and I as she groggily wakes up, and chooses the moment to say he's going to look for fresh water and something to sleep on.  
“Okay.” I clear my throat and speak for the first time in about three or four hours. As he leaves, politely, diligently – to put it simply, in a totally uncharacteristic way – I shuffle across the floor to where Jess is sat on a silver cabinet that used to be stocked with Prozac, clean syringes and little metal bowls. She takes my hand without a word and eats the tinned strawberries one-handed. She's retained some of the information I've told her about her situation, but most of it has slipped from her mind in intermittent sleep.  
“Tell me what happened.” She croaks, fingers shaking between mine.   
“Eat first.”  
“God, you're not my dad. Don't tell me what to do.” She rolls her eyes. “I don't need to be treated like a child.”  
“Then stop acting like one.” I groan, and she stabs a strawberry with the clean suture needle with even more fervor. It's apparently the closest thing she could find to cutlery.  
“In case you haven't realised, I'm pretty fucked off, Joan.” She laments, and I prop my head on her knee. She doesn't push me away, even after a moment of hesitation that suggested she was considering it. “That Doctor, do you promise me that he's dead?” She asks softly, after a moment of slow, careful eating.   
“Promise.”  
“I kept having these nightmares.” Her voice changes. The sarcasm that she's been putting on in front of Gluskin – as a way of protecting herself, I realise – drops like a theatre curtain. “His skin. He was like a massive brown beetle or something. It was disgusting. I can't believe that I almost cared about him.”  
“Don't think on it.”  
“No.” She interjects, cheeks flushed suddenly. “I won't stop thinking about it. You don't understand – I've been there for however long, high as shit, unable to speak properly. Unable to even string a sentence together or think rationally. Let me piece this together. I don't want to sweep it under the carpet.” She meets my gaze, and her eyes are brimming with angry tears. She continues stabbing strawberries and scarfing them down. “Fuck you, strawberry. Fuck you. Fuck everyone.”  
I choke back laughter, and she nearly smiles despite herself.  
“Right, if you won't talk about what happened, I will. I'll take it from the beginning. Everything I remember. I kept dreaming I was in Atlanta, by the ocean. But it was so cold and everything was green. I felt sick all the time, and someone was making me eat little dried up insects. It was gross. Then I remember waking up, sort of, and falling on a metal floor. People were screaming. A man was on fire and running back and forth. I could see his skin being flayed by the fire. Then the Doctor's hand was on my arm, and he pulls me up. He drags me after him, through corridors, then I'm forced down into a wheelchair. Tied up, and I panic. I knock the thing over and try to get out, but then he takes a fire extinguisher, and...” She taps the side of her face, pushing back her dark hair to reveal a purplish, swollen welt. “On the head.”  
“Fuck, Jess.”  
“Then I wake up, with my legs suspended, and I can feel this... this thing, between my legs.” And all the colour drains from her face. She can hardly look at me. “I know what you're thinking, and I – I don't know what happened. I just don't know.” Her mouth stretches into a grimace and her eyes tipple over, she sets down the can because her hands are shaking too hard. “It felt cold, like metal. Like a fucking cattle prod, I – and my feet looked weird and too white, I was losing weight. It must have been days I was under, but I was in that room with no windows, so I had no idea. He's talking to me and his voice is so distorted because I'm high, he sounds like you sometimes, like Noah some other times. I tell him so many things, because I think he's you.” Her breathing comes hard and fast, and I grasp her hand tighter.  
“It's over. It's not going to happen again. I promise.” A pause, and a hoarse sob rips from her throat. A fat, hot tear falls into my wrist and licks a shiny path over my skin.   
“I'm awake when he takes off the first toe.” Then she stops again, because she can't handle this, and with a metal clatter I stand up and get my arms around her, the cabinet doors knocked by my knees. She talks into my hair. “There was hardly any blood. I remember I was so surprised. It was so surreal, Joan, like popping off the feet of one of those dolls, you know – the ones you used to have when you were little. I saw all the gristle and this white shit, the bone, and-” Her fingers claw into my back and tense up spasmodically. My hair is wet. “J-Just cut it off. I was sick and nearly choked on my vomit, but I managed not to. I managed not to.”  
“It's okay.” I breathe, and she cries even harder. I know it's not going to be okay. She knows it's not going to be okay. But I say it anyway. “You can stop talking if you want to.”  
“Then the other toe, I don't remember it so much. But it hurt more. It hurt like, like-” She shakes her head. “I don't fucking know.” Then she does stop talking, and she sobs into me until she's wrung dry, and she must feel aching and empty, like the feeling on your stomach after vomiting, but all over. Her whole body has been through an upheaval. I realise he must have touched her more than once, can feel that she's omitting all the times he must have abused her. And I cry too, feeling as if her brown hair were the brown wings of a moth and she's been kissing firelight while I was gone. Now she's just trying to hide the burns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while since I've worked on this fanfic, so I apologise that my characterisation is a little off! It may take me a chapter or two to get back into the flow, but I'm going to give it my all. For a while, I didn't know if I was going to continue this, but then there was a moth trapped in my room and I was reminded that I still had a lot I wanted to write for these characters. So I had one long writing session that felt kind of intense. 
> 
> I loved writing Jess's dialogue and bringing her back into the story, because writing her in a drugged state made me sad. She deserves to be spunky.
> 
> (Expect: more kissing, the Twins, fire everywhere, and also that bastard Jeremy Blair.)   
> Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He crosses a line. 
> 
> (TW for needles)

Gluskin returns with two tattered mattresses from patient beds, finding Jess and I sat cross-legged opposite each other, talking about something inane. Her eyes are still puffy and rimmed with pink and, as he enters, she glances to me furtively as if looking for guidance as to how to respond.  
“Thank you.” I say falteringly, and he sets the two mattresses down side by side. Only two, presumably for Jess and I. The evening has folded itself around the whole building and its grounds, and for the first time since arriving here, I can feel a strange sense of equilibrium. I've been daubing antiseptic onto the leg wound, replacing the dressing using what scant resources we've found, and re-dressed it. I realise that the Pyromaniac's vaccine and disinfection have been invaluable. The cool evening air, grey as smoke, soothes the hot sensation of my pulse throbbing in the wound. It gapes open, an exhausted, slack maw, the yellow-green pus dried over, the blood crusted to brown. It will get stitches soon. I'll have a hospital bed, clean sheets, painkillers. Relief washes over me, and the tension ebbs from my pale shoulders.  
Gluskin's calculating gaze flits between my leg, Jess and I, and a stilted silence ensues. Only the sound of the crickets outside, of a dog barking somewhere in the city, permeate the dark quiet.  
“Well, I'm going to try to sleep. Without drugs.” Jess says with a forced half-smile, lifting herself up and patting down the hospital robes. “I wonder what the withdrawals will be like. And maybe tomorrow we can find some proper clothes for me, huh? So I don't have to worry about flashing every inmate.” Her eyes dance with familiar life as she steps over to a mattress and heavily plops down atop it.  
“Or you could use it as a weapon.”  
“What, the sight or smell?” She quips. “Both are pretty nasty. I really need to shower. Just putting that out there.”  
“Gross.” I grumble, and she seems to enjoy the sour look on Gluskin's face. His eyes then travel out of the window into the fenced-in yard shrouded in night, lit by a single white lamp casting a cone of bluish white onto the rough concrete. It's several moments before he speaks to me. I can feel the words coming before they even reach the air.  
“Joan, can I talk to you for a moment? Outside?”  
I nod in hesitant affirmation, hand reaching for the hilt of the axe but then thinking better of it. Jess blows out the candles we'd lit to prevent the darkness from swallowing the whole room, and says goodnight. I leave the axe in the room in case she needs it, looking back over my shoulder at the spirals of black on black smoke that coil around her body. The moonlight falls backward through the door that Gluskin opens, illuminating the soft line of her body with silver. His shadow stretches long across the room as he waits for me to follow. My skin prickles as I realise my guard is down, and he and I are to be alone. But I follow nonetheless, stepping out into the cool late summer night. The bite of autumn is already on the air, and I feel as if the seasons have turned too quickly, the smell of the world transforming during my time in this place.  
It's as I'm contemplating the sweet odour of decay from the forest that I realise he called me by my name. I cast him a sheepish sidelong glance as he walks ahead of me, hands in his pockets, gait somehow jovial. It reminds me of Frank Sinatra in the movie Guys and Dolls. The juxtaposition between Technicolor Hollywood and this cold, hollow wilderness with the wind whistling through it, like a lisp between teeth, makes my skin prickle. There's a veil of cloud in the sky blocking several constellations of stars, and in the sky a waxing moon is semi-obscured. It looks yellowish, almost auburn, as moons often appear in autumn. The grass beyond the concrete yard still smacks of heavy rain, and I realise it can't have been long since the storm occurred. But the sun has swallowed so much of the water in the yard that it's dry enough to sit, and I do so, crossing my legs and trying to alleviate some of the weight from my injury.  
“It's a nice night.” He says, and I look to see how the sky bleeds from black to blue to emerald where the trees begin. Like a woman's dress. Like the skin of an adder. I imagine how it must look and feel deep in the forest now at night, smelling of damp and sounding alive with yellow-eyed nocturnal creatures.  
“I suppose it is.” The cool air is good on my face, on my perpetually-burning cheeks, but his sudden false levity disconcerts me. Tension rolls off his shoulders despite his shallow statement about the pleasantness of the evening. “You're going to ask me about what I looked at in that room.” My boldness is going to get me lacerated eventually. Whatever. It's going to happen at some point anyway.  
“You never hold your tongue, do you?” He says drolly, and I grit my teeth together, remaining stubbornly silent. He wants a rise out of me. “It makes my blood boil.”  
“My tongue is the only reason I'm still alive.” I say carefully, watching him as he curls his fingers into the wire mesh and pushes it testily, leaning his weight into the fence. It creaks like chain-link armour. “If I had said nothing when I was on that table, you would have cut me in half.”  
“Perhaps I regret not doing it. Have you considered that?” He turns his face and I see his profile, pale in the darkness. A raven unfolds its wings somewhere and bursts free of the trees, labouring high into the sky, a black dot like a mite against the clouds and stars.  
“Maybe you should try harder next time.” I spit. Stupid. Facetious, actually, and I wish I hadn't said anything, because this makes him wheel round and clear the space between us. He yanks me to my feet and knocks all the air out of me as he pulls me by the overalls onto the very edge of my toes, his scarred face level with mine. The light plays off the mottled skin, the raw wounds probably humming with his elevated pulse, and the mouth too handsome for such a haggard face. I'm consumed by confused hatred and I lash against his hands, but he holds me fast.  
“I did try. I tried as hard as I could to kill you, but it wouldn't happen – everything here has tried to kill you, and nothing has worked. You're not real.” He snarls. “You can't be killed, can you? You were sent here by my mother to make a mockery of me!”  
“I came here to try and save you.” I grunt, and he drops me in derision, leaving me to crumple to the floor, my leg knifed through with white hot pain. My elbows graze the concrete and pop red blood on the grey. Another metallic bang as he throws a punch into the fence and the sound doubles over, echoes back, resounds around the whole yard. He knots his own fingers in his hair and I shake with rage on the ground. “I saw the photographs in your bedroom, I read through them – I know what happened, I know what you think your mother did, and it doesn't warrant any of this.”  
“You don't know anything.” He says, and the words lilt upwards at the end, so like a child, petulant and stubborn even though he knows I'm right. “I thought you were like me, that you understood, but no one does.”  
“Then talk to me.” I demand.  
“Why?”  
“Make me understand.” A pause. The night seems to burst at the seams with my pulse, with his tension. “That's why I came here. Because I saw who you were before-”  
“A monster.” He says.  
“What?” I echo.  
“I was a monster then, and I'm a monster now. Nothing ever changes."  
"That's a stupid thing to say." I reply, and to my surprise, he merely tilts his head contemplatively, hands fitfully tensing.  
"You read all the pages, did you? Then there's not much left for me to say. When I was young, as you know, it started. We used to go to the Lake, and my father would talk to me about the monster that lived underwater.” Silence, and his fingers rake across the wire mesh again, slowly this time, like a cat clawing up and down a door, wanting to be let out. “He talked to me about a lot of things. About women. About art. And about the monster that lived underneath the water – it was so dark, the water, that you could almost believe him. He only used to joke about it, and that was what he said he was fishing for whenever I used to go with him. I liked our fishing trips. For a while.” Quiet again, and there're small noises in the back of his throat, keening, half-formed words. “When he touched me, it used to start on the fishing trips. Uncle Peter didn't used to be involved, not at first, because I think father was testing my boundaries. He used the monster as an excuse first – said it would eat me if I didn't behave. I had nightmares about it. I remember the water flies and the dragonflies and the smell of fish bait on his hands, and I... I used to look at the lake instead, to try and see if the monster was in there somewhere. Watching. To make sure I did as I was told. That was the very beginning. Before Uncle Peter got involved, and before he used to talk about my mother.”  
I say nothing.  
“In my dreams, the monster had at least six legs, like a salamander, and it was dark and scaled. Like an aquatic lizard. It had these pale eyes, these dead fish eyes, with no pupils. After I put my mother to sleep, after I thought I'd silenced her forever, I saw the monster walk through the hallway. Over everyone I had put to rest. It had its webbed feet, and it was sopping with dark river water. And I realised its eyes were like mine, and its tongue was like mine. And then the more I looked, the more the monster was me. It's inside me, like a bullet I can't get out.”  
My mouth is dry, my lips wooly from where my mouth is slightly ajar. The coldness of the concrete seeps through to my legs, my back, through my clothes, and I rest my palms on the ground as I watch him rub his head against the fence, mussing his dark hair.  
“It wasn't really there.” I say quietly, and he laughs low in his throat.  
“I know.” He replies. “It was never there. It was just a part of me, of my own mind.”  
“What did they diagnose you with, when you came here?”  
“There was no diagnosis. There were handcuffs, and Blair's smug face in my prison cell, him watching me in the back of the long black car like a vivisected frog when they drove me up here. They didn't administer any drugs. I procured drawing equipment from a nurse, and that's the only therapy I got.” His voice lifts. “Nurse Frasier, her name was.”  
I gawk at him for a moment, sliding into place the memories of her kitchen, her son in his slumping band t-shirt. Norma Frasier, who is probably dead. The silence stretches on, and he's quiet, in contemplation, before he changes the subject.  
“You kissed your friend.” He says it like a question, watching my face searchingly from over his shoulder. Still tugging almost anxiously at the mesh.  
“Yeah. And?”  
“I wanted to ask you why.”  
“That's none of your business.” I reply, and he narrows his eyes, sucking in his right cheek and seemingly chewing on the inside of it. My face burns a little, and I prop my elbows on my knees, resting my chin on my arms and deciding to watch the night instead. When I look back, his eyes are still on me, so I supply, “I was just happy to see that she was alive. Okay?”  
“Is that what people usually do, when they're happy someone is alive?”  
“I – yes. No. I don't know.” I shrug a shoulder. “It says things better than words can. She's my best friend. I thought I'd lost her forever at that hands of that... freak.” Emotion wells in my throat, and I find myself surprised.  
He turns around slowly, locking his fingers together, playing with them restlessly as if they were a distracting toy. He approaches and then comes to kneel in front of me, and I glance at his feet, choosing them as a substitute for looking into his eyes. I'm watching the brown leather of the tattered shoes crease a little as he leans forward, and his chin unexpectedly ruts against my forehead, causing me to lurch backwards. My back smacks the concrete and I taste blood in my mouth as I bite down hard on my tongue, blinking back tears of pain and cussing around the wetness.  
I mumble profanities as he leans over me, face looking intensely focused, as if performing a difficult task, the pale blue eyes glassy. He looks almost flushed and I feel my eyes bug wide as his nose bumps mine. His skin is warm, breath falling over me like the smoke from the extinguished candles. His mouth presses against my lips, rough and hot, for what must have been less than a few seconds, his lips inarticulately moving against me. My eyes are open all the while, hands braced against his shoulders, and I realise that I'm not breathing. His eyes flutter closed and several soft, dirty tendrils of dark hair scathe my cheeks and it's too much all at once, the weight of his body covering me, his pulse rocketing against my skin.  
“I didn't mean what I said.” He mouths against me. “I'm glad you're still alive.” The scar tissue jagged and velvet-like as he nips my bottom lip and the contact jump-starts the neurons in my brain. His eyes open slowly and the colour, like melting winter, like the dirty snow of February, disappears as I push him away and shimmy back towards the door, all elbows and knees and frantic scuffling. I leap to my feet and he, looking as if he's received an electric shock, falteringly stands up with wide eyes.  
“I-”  
“Don't.” I snap, opening the door and bolting inside, stepping through the shadow, shaking Jess by the shoulders and picking up the knapsack and axe in one fluid motion. “Jess, we're leaving. Wake up.” She jerks into a sitting position in the darkness, brown eyes wide and almost luminescent, and my hand is coiled around her wrist, tugging her to her feet.  
“What is it?” Groggily.  
“Come on. Please” I hiss, and we hurry past the medicine cabinets into the darkness, breaking into a run. The door to the courtyard is opened wide, casting his long, still shadow in the silver light. His touch burns me, crawling over my skin like ants, and we run to shake it off. Corridors and whirls of broken glass, pummeled windows like punched-in eye sockets, and all the while my heart pounding. My body alive, as if he were the serrated edge of a live wire, crackling with white and blue electricity.  
We labour at a run for some time, my palm growing clammy around her narrow wrist, and I can feel the small bones creak under her olive skin, her breathing coming ragged and fast, her whole body struggling under the strain of drug withdrawal. Then she trips on something with an echoing cry and is splayed out across the floor, over a glittering floor studded with smashed glass, her bare knees bit into by the pale shards.  
“Fuck – Joan, I can't do this.” She whines, arms shaking with the effort of lifting herself back onto her feet. Her eyes blaze at me in the darkness and I realise that my whole body is bristling. My mouth feels scorched. I rub my lips over and over as if trying to eradicate a thin film of something pasted over them. “What is it?”  
“Nothing.” I snap, voice hitching. I chew my bottom lip and it tastes like him. I reach down and seize her hands. “God, I'm sorry. But we can't stay with him. I don't trust him, he's...”  
“Mad? A complete lunatic? A murderer?” She says, with the utmost seriousness, and we stare stonily at each other. “I wasn't asleep, Joan, I heard what happened. He could've woken up the whole hospital.”  
“What did you hear?”  
“Almost everything. I was going to get the axe and come to your rescue, but he went quiet. Then he started saying...other things. It was like being in the headlights of a truck. I felt like I couldn't move, it was somehow... I don't know, stilling.” She replies, and I realise her amber eyes with their flecks of molten are crossing my face as if she scarcely knows me. She bends down and pries dirty glass from her pink, grazed knees. Hisses as a piece becomes embedded in her foot. I drop my axe as she tip-toes over the glass and then slumps against the wall opposite, her form flung into partial shadow, only her mouth and throat illuminated by a shaft of moonlight from a nearby window. Her lips still purplish and bruised. Like the oceanic wing colour of a monarch butterfly, grazing her mouth with its cool hues. I pick up her foot wordlessly, humiliation at what she must have heard making it difficult to breathe, to think.  
The shard is short and thick, its tapered end like a scorpion's barb latched into her instep, between her yellowed, clammy soles. I pick it out and a bead of stunning claret begins to head on her skin. She inclines her head, one brown eye squinting at me in the silver light, the pupil shrunken.  
“What happened?” She asks softly, and my chest feels as if it physically constricts.  
“I don't know.” I reply falteringly.  
“He was talking to you about his dad, about a lake. Then something about a monster. That's pretty much all I heard.” She pauses. “The Doctor told me he used to charm women and then murder them.” Her whisper is deadly. “Is that what he's doing to you?”  
“I don't know!” The thought somehow makes me feel nauseous. My cheeks go up in puce and magenta and I press the pad of my thumb to the incision, clotting the wound, trying not to kneel on the glass myself. Why does the thought of such a thing make me angry? Vanity. I want to be different, some kind of savior. Like always, my bullshit self-righteousness, my misplaced desire for repentance, is clouding my judgement.  
“Joan, did he... try anything?” Her lips are coiled into a grimace of disgust, and by way of response I merely flick my eyes up to meet hers. I wonder what she sees there. I wonder if I've changed. “He did.” It sounds like an accusation.  
“Once.” I reply, helping her to her feet, and she staggers into me, losing balance. She exhales hard as she hits my chest, and when she draws back I can see the intermingling of fear, humiliation, anger. Then she turns her face away from me and we walk on, our bare feet scuffling the ground in perfect time, shards of grey light crossing over our faces. My axe like a tightrope walker's balance rod between my fingers, ensconced in my closed fist.  
“Did you kiss back?” She asks very quietly, so quietly that the words are almost lost between the crickets rubbing thighs somewhere in the grasses outside. I don't respond at first, because her words cause the smell of him to fold itself around me like origami, blocking out the moon and the desolate corridor we walk down with its boarded doors and busted windows. He felt like anyone else, like any other man. I realise only now that he must be older than his childish mannerisms betray. My stomach flips and it's uncertain whether this disgusts or excites me. Maybe neither, maybe both.  
“No.” I reply. There doesn't seem to be much I'm certain of now, except that Jess and I are becoming different entities. His mouth still lingers on me, and I feel my lips must be glowing red in the darkness, omitting light like a flash-dance of guttering bulbs. Everyone can see him on me. He was the reason I came. “Jess, I was so naïve to think I could help him.” I say. “That... that sounded less pathetic in my head.”  
“I was, too. It wasn't just you.” She sighs. “I feel older. I feel like I've lived centuries since I last had a hot meal, last saw you in your ordinary clothes. Do you think your family is okay?” She probes.  
“I feel sick thinking about it. But at least your family should be okay - this was my stupid fucking mistake, Blair has no reason to threaten you.”  
“I don't think I trust Blair to keep a promise.” She sounds close to tears again, so I hold her hand. “Do you promise me you didn't kiss him back?” She adds, after a moment or two.  
“Does it matter that much?” The axe nearly slips from my sweat-slick fingers. I swing it up onto my shoulder where the knapsack of food still clashes out its metronome of cans gnashing like teeth. My stomach twists like a pit adder lives inside it.  
“Guess not.” She backtracks, and her fingers are loose in mine. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes back, and my heart feels settles again. The moth stops cracking its wings against the bell jar and finally rests. “Where are we going?”  
“Communications centre. CCTV records. We need them – we can bring the videos to the public and crack the whole thing open.” I've never said that phrase before – I've always wanted to. Makes me feel like a spy, or a soldier. “I don't know where it is, a man I met... he was going to show me where it was. He never got to.”  
“The CCTV room?” She says, and her face falls slack with raking her memory.  
“Jess-”  
“No, no. Shut up. I'm thinking.” She rubs her brows together and her dark eyes meet the ground, lips ajar, then she nods. “I've seen it. It's next to the entertainment hall. The Doctor brought me through there on the way to his little dungeon. There's a series of corridors through the inmates' compound, and a big black piano with its lid snapped in two and all the strings tangled up in the entertainment hall. You take a right, I think, then you're there.”  
“No way.” I exhale. “You just remembered all that?”  
“I was trying to jump out of the wheelchair like something possessed. I remember every second.” She says, and this time she leads the way.

We weave in and out of the building on her command, side-stepping carefully over the ricketing wooden planks that branch between networks of scaffolding, and her dark hair lifts up in the cold wind to meet the night sky. The boards creak and my leg hums with agony, as if the phantom of my injury still lives in the cells, and I find myself scrabbling at the sides of the bricks, looking for grooves to slot my nails. I scrabble for the most part like a rat in a maze, eyes flitting from one unstable outcropping to the next, praying this girl knows what she's doing. I realise how little of her arc of movement I've seen before, during lounging in front of my blue laptop light, meeting for coffee and looking at her polished nails around a wide cup brimming with froth, walking into town, even when she would take elegant long strides over my wet canvases during our art exams. I used to look up and warn her not to step on my painted figures. That was how we first met. She nearly trod on one of my paintings and I berated her, red in the face, crouched on the floor in a crumpled blue t-shirt hanging off my shoulder and trying to look more hipster than I was. She merely turned and held up a hand in silent apology, whistling quietly from between her teeth to the tinny beat of her iphone earbuds. My blood burnt around me in embarrassment and as I went to clean my brushes with alcohol I leaned over her work. She was creating a three-dimensional little model of a 'deconstructed tree', she called it. And then I wasn't angry anymore. I was enraptured.  
It's only now as she swings her legs over the metal poles and the wind rakes through our filth-rimed hair that I hear her whistle that same tune from when we met, and I realise I've hardly seen her move. Only that day.  
“Come on.” She grunts in silver furls onto the crisp air. “It's only one more. Then we take the stairs down – look, don't glare at me like that. If we take this route, I'm pretty sure we'll have averted a good amount of the inmate rooms.” She glances back over her shoulder. I'm meeting her all over again. My stomach takes a pitfall. “You don't want us to get murdered, do you?” She grins, actually grins. She's crazy.  
“Where were you all this time I was here?” I sigh, and she yanks me over the metal bar. Wood creaks underfoot and through the cracks I see the concrete.  
“When we get out, we can get your leg looked at. And get me some underwear. I hope there's no peeping toms on the ground floor, because if there are they're getting a stellar panty shot.” Flashes those teeth again, and with that she wrenches open the nearest window with its push-up 19th Century shaft. We slip inside, landing on bare feet that – for a long time – meet carpet.  
“Oh, man.” I whisper, and she laughs.  
“Actual fucking carpet.”  
“My feet are so happy.”  
“Mine would be happier if I had all my toes. But never mind.” And she slips away into the gloom of what appears to be a library. “See? Evaded all the cells.”  
“Remember to keep quiet, okay?” I chide under my breath, and she nods, her shadow inky in the dark.  
I trace my fingers over the spines of the books, mostly medical journals, some of them dating back to 1912. Others, however, are more recent, and as I stop by a cabinet shelved with Second World War medical records, my hand lands upon one of the only books without a sheath of dust.  
“Jess. Come look at this.”  
I open the thing squarely in the middle, and the woodland scent of books fills my nostrils. The pages are fairly yellowed and several corners are dog-eared from being crossed over. Some unintelligible notes scribbled in the margins.  
“Old bullshit. Tell me why I should care?”  
“When you were unconscious, Gluskin was telling me about Murkoff's past employees.” His name feels leaden, wooly and heavy, on my tongue. His lips ghost over me again in my memory, warm breath filling my mouth with the scent of spices, the different bands of blue and grey and murky green in his eyes up close. The ruptured blood vessels. I touch my mouth and clear my throat. “They had a Second World War history. Experiments, inhumane, behind closed doors of concentration camps, where no one could see.”  
Jess makes a noise of vague disgust, then turns her back and paces the room. “Tell me when you're done. I'm going to look around.”  
I pace towards the window, where the light still ebbs in, and trace my finger over the page. Still not light enough. I don't want to squint my eyes to shit. I hold the book in one hand and the axe in the other as I kneel by a little oak cupboard and prod my hand around blindly, biting my lip and praying for no sizeable spiders. A clink of metal on metal as my fingers brush something, and I gently pull it out. Hooked around my index finger is the handle of a dust-laced oil lamp.  
“Shit.” I say, although it's nothing of the sort. It's breathtaking, the bronze worn down and mottled with pale green from ageing. I plant it down on the cupboard and find a small box of matches to go with it. My fingers cold and shaking, I light one, and the little bead of warm flame makes my pulse race. Light the lamp, hold it over the book and kneel with my chin propped on the edge of the little cupboard.  
“The second surgery that Lucille 1 and Lucille 2 underwent produced increased awareness in the pain suffered by the other. Physically linking the two cerebral cortex's of 1 and 2 with artificially produced nerve cells improved pain receptivity by 42%. However, this is not enough to prove a substantial link between each of the twins feeling pain. By artificially linking each cerebral cortex it follows that electrical reactions would ensue as normal. Lucille 1 and Lucille 2 also perished from dire blood loss. However, Howard 1 and Howard 2 have proven more successful. A procedure to investigate shared emotions (in this case, fear) promised a positive correlation between Howard 1 being in a fear-inducing situation and Howard 2, being in a different building altogether, also experiencing fear. Worth exploring if we want dual hosts for W.”  
Then several hand-drawn charts in pencil underneath, a jumble of medical jargon and scrawled numbers that I dismiss as primarily useless. I rip the page out, fold it four ways and store it in the little space between the glass and the metal holster of the oil lamp before holding it high and picking up the axe again.  
“Done, Jess.” I say aloud. No answer. “Jess? Jessica?” Cuss under my breath, because this was never unusual for her when we would go out. I'd be buying shopping only to turn around and find her having disappeared. Only, I didn't think she would risk something in such a situation as this. I pace up and down the rows of bookshelves, panic swelling in my chest as I walk faster, discovering each row looks unnervingly like the next.  
Suddenly, a piercing sound splits the night air in two like a great dark cloth, and I see her arm falling through the air at the end of the row of bookshelves as if she's underwater, and her whole body follows. Hips strike the ground with a smack. Her hair in tendrils of gold, lit up in the flame from the oil lamp, slumps around her as her arms fall. They splay like a fractured doll. Her mouth is slack, tongue resting on her bottom lip like that of a dead animal frozen in its last spasm of fear. Her eyes roll over to me like marbles, glassy and wooden. Veins of bright blood spider out from her open mouth, and I drop to the ground next to her, lamp clattering. Me, screaming. Her body in shadow, broken at the foot of two men like obelisks, like great trees, towering over us. A word crackles out from the back of her throat, like a lost song on a radio station. I lunge for her body, trying to grasp her hand, but to no avail. They begin to drag her through the carpet, away from me, like an open-mouthed carcass, but my body is almost paralysed. My hands remain open and reaching for her, fingers pale and splayed in front of my face like the curled joints of a skeleton, my mouth no longer making any sounds, because something has pricked the back of my neck.  
A jab. Something plunged into my bloodstream, making me want to vomit.  
I collapse onto my front and convulse with sudden sickness, my skin crawling, and I'm gagging into the carpet, searching for air. The oil lamp is discarded in my peripheral vision and the axe falls from my fingers. Someone grasps me and in my mind's eye I see his pale gaze like ocean water tossing itself onto cragged rocks, the blues and the greys and the mouth that stained me red. But then I'm flipped over onto my back, whole body alight with nausea, my hands in front of me twitching spasmodically, and a man with a rugged, dark jaw and beetle black eyes, positively burning in intensity, is staring down into my face. He wears a weathered sheepskin jacket fringed with white fur, the collar turned up into his rough, unshaven neck. He glowers into me, into my frothing mouth, like a metal hook around my naval as the lights around me grow dim and his figure blots out the autumn moon. Between his fingers balances an empty syringe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a rather long one - I had a blast writing it, though, especially the end. In a few days I'll be leaving for university, and writing this fic has been doing me a world of good in trying to combat my nerves. It's a great relief from the constant packing.
> 
> Someone I've been waiting to write makes a cameo - you'll have to guess who. I'm very excited. I'm also incredibly pumped to write the Twins, as they're criminally underused. They leave a ton of room for me to stray from canon (my favourite thing to do, so I apologise in advance for the forays into weirdness) and to flesh out some backstory for Murkoff, Blair and Gluskin.
> 
> Eddie will be back, I promise. I'm just being a tease. Constructive crit welcome as always. Enjoy!


	17. The End Of Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello!  
> It's been two years. Wow. Am I sorry I left or am I sort of stunned that I've come back to give you all an ending?   
> I've had this ending written for about a year and a half, I believe, and I've wanted to post it for so long. Because I loved it. Still do. 
> 
> I want to say thank you for all your comments - I read them all, and I'm so touched that people enjoyed this fic. Because at the time it was like my own kind of self-made therapy for my own trauma, and in hindsight I can see how much writing this fic has helped me heal from when I was raped.
> 
> I won't go back into the story and write from where I left off, because my writing style is a quite different, and it would do a disservice to the story and - most importantly - to you, the people who have been reading it. So there are gaps, and this ending is in fragments, but hopefully you'll enjoy it all the same. Thank you for all the love.

The gates of Mount Massive asylum are an open mouth before me. The red dawn glows between the dark linear trees, silhouetting them in inky black, their crooked fingers stretching to the sky, to the departing clouds. My legs can hardly carry me, but still I push on, until I shake and fall to the ground, the concrete smacking my palms and making my knees ring with pain. The concrete below me, the acrid smell of the gasoline, the filth coating my one-piece, working its sooty pitch dirt into the lines of my feet and between my toes. I gasp like a landed fish as the smell of bonfire smoke fills my lungs, the wet crispness of morning air, the way the earth seems to fizzle like a put-out fire. Rain bleeds its scent and it reminds me of home, of warm arms and the wrap-around porch and my cat, and I curl into a hunched ball in the parking lot and wonder how the hell I will ever slot back into the rhythm of life before this. I feel I could empty my bowels right here from the panic of trying to piece my life back together, but I choke down the feeling and instead I make myself stand up. I see Jess in the jeep beyond the speed humps and the open maw of the iron gates like incisors. Her face with her dark soulful eyes through the fogged window, staring out at me with the distant gaze of a figure in a painting. Miles sits at the wheel beside her, looking not at me but at the figure of the hospital rising like a jagged shard of architecture out of the earth. Burnt, charred, scarred beyond recognition and dark as a lean animal. He bites his fingers with some kind of neuroticism, whilst my best friend looks solemnly outward at me with her leaner face, the hollowed cheeks and eyes heavy with the touch of this place. Her lips slightly parted, her breath lacing the window with silver. She's wondering who I am, who she is, if we will ever interlock our fingers on the couch again and tell each other things meaningless and personal and pained. I hope we will.  
The concrete and the fractures in the concrete below me. I lie on the ground on my side curled up with the water vapour in the air dressing my wounds like gauze. No one says anything. Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounds from the laboratory. It is a far and mournful cry.  
Then somebody's presence soundlessly impregnates the air around me, and I know him before I see him. His footsteps are cat-soft, steady as a metronome. I recognise Eddie from the long gait. He stops, and I don't turn to face him because I don't care right now. Because I want there to be clouds, to be tumultuous bruising rain that will swallow me up and erase the swelling in my chest and the emotions. I want it gone. I want the white slate after orgasm. When thinking is no longer relevant.  
“Is it all gone?” I ask him, and my voice is hoarse and deep. Scuffed like the soles of shoes. My voice tells all the things I've seen, the monsters I could have been, the same way that tyre treads count the miles you drive.  
“No. I don't think it will ever be gone.” He replies, and the slight lisp, the avoidance of harsh plosives, is somehow a small comfort. Like rounding a sharp edge, like a ball of yarn. I'm thinking so much bullshit. I must be in shock. Maybe I have a concussion. Maybe this place has just fucked me up. “But if you mean the research, the papers, the Morphogenic Engine – it's all destroyed.”  
I nod slowly in my stupor, desensitised to the world. Then I realise I am lying on the concrete floor of a parking lot outside a burnt-out mental hospital with no shoes, no underwear and no clue of how to proceed. I feel like I've just exited the womb.  
“Good. That's good.” I mutter.  
“Are you okay? You're shaking. You must be freezing. Do you want my shirt?”  
“I'm fine.”  
But he walks over, kneels beside me in his slacks, and his scent overwhelms me. Warm cotton, musk, spices, peaches, permeating the bonfire smell and the rain. I turn to look up at him but the glare of the sun bleaches him out, leaves only his scarlet scars and one single blue eye visible. One of his large, tapered hands finds its way under my head, around the shell of my ear, supporting my head. I realise that he is also shaking.  
“You're terrified, aren't you?” I say as he lifts my head onto his knee, and I realise how degrading this must look to Jess, to the man at the wheel of the jeep, my spent sack of a body limp over the leg of a murderer. “You're terrified to be free of this place.”  
The kind hand on my face again, not as a source of physical comfort but as a wordless answer; he is violently shaking. He is scared. Of course. But then his palm finds my skin and his pulse rockets second-hand through me. One, two, three.  
“My guardian angel.” He exhales, and the words make my chest ignite. There's a lump in my throat and tears threaten to leak from the sides of my eyes.  
“Yeah, you've definitely got a concussion.” I retort, but I don't move from where my head rests on his leg. “I'm not anyone's saviour. I can't even save myself. I endangered my best friend's life and I nearly died too many times for me to remember. So don't you dare put me on a fucking pedestal. I'm a ruin. I don't know if I can even stand up and go back home. I don't know where to put myself now that this is all over.”  
“Joan-”  
“I let you think I was like a dream figure, like some kind of guide or guardian, so you would keep me alive. To make you think you needed me – it was self-preservation. I'm sorry.” I babble, raising myself up onto my elbows and brushing myself off, leaning back from him. Ash marks his brow and his temple still bleeds, but his expression is one of disarming nakedness. I see the red of my hair small as a porcelain figurine inside his pale blue eyes, and the sunrise shafting pink over his cheek. “I'm not a liar by nature. It hurts me, to lie.”  
“I know. I've known for a while.” He murmurs, and I have to bite my lip not to interject. “But you're no liar. Just because you perceive yourself a certain way doesn't mean it is so. Other people can sometimes see you clearer than you see yourself – I can tell you, you're not a dream figure or a hallucination. I didn't dream you up in the Engine. I don't think my mind could have done it. You're a ruin? If you say so. But you're still a guardian angel. I want... I couldn't hurt you because it was like looking in the mirror. You took everything about me that I can't stand and threw it right back at me. Brewer's Lake, my father, my mother... the years, they replayed themselves in my head. I could smell the silt of the lake. I could hear the pine trees rubbing together in the early morning and at dusk – it assaulted me. It was like you held the lake in your eyes, like you had been there and seen every moment, and then I somehow felt like a traitor. I had somehow betrayed you by enforcing revenge on someone that actually understood me, that may as well have been there.”  
“I don't know if it's that simple.”  
“I'm trying to say that... you're not a saviour. But you made me want to be better, and that was enough. You are kind, and you are terrifying, and you are fiercely in love with life. I want that. I can't undo the things I've done, and I can't justify them, and I don't know if I can walk away from what I am. What I was. But I – I want to try. Please let me try.” His voice fissures and water dances in his eyes, he chokes on insignificant and poorly-chosen words and I find myself gravitating toward him like a child towards the foaming lip of the sea. When you run forward, put your toes in, run back, laughing, not knowing if you like the sensation or not but doing it regardless.  
“What are you asking me?”  
“I expect nothing.” He swallows and says it seriously, brow furrowed. “I'm not asking you for anything.” A tear drops from his bottom lashes like snow from the boughs of a tree and then I'm leaning forward and pressing a kiss to the spot where it runs down his cheek, through the little ravines of his scars. His scent grows tenfold, his warmth on me, and the texture of the scar tissue repulses me at first but I remain close to him, simply hanging in the air like dust particles in light, like that child by the sea, just curious. He makes a small keening noise in the back of his throat, hardly even audible, and my lips still hover close to his skin. Then ecstasy is growing inside me, making it almost impossible to speak, and I rut my brow against his.  
“You don't want this.” He whispers.  
“Don't tell me what I want.”  
“Then I'll tell you what this is - a bad idea.” He pulls back a little and he holds my gaze with burning eyes. My entire body seems to react, heat and adrenaline rending me. “I will not risk this with you.”  
“You said you wanted to try.”  
“I want to try to be good. There's a difference.” He's conflicted, treading the line between desire and panic, and I impulsively reach out and touch his face, the scars. He nearly flinches but I keep eye contact with him, enraptured, watching as the cool fear in the glassy, translucent gaze evaporates, melts into something else. The blood thrums ardently around me and I realise how little the poets know when they write about the beauty of soft alabaster skin, and how ignorant the magazines and billboards are when they promote their perfection. What they sell is not what I want. Smooth virgin skin is not real life – we are chewed up and burnt and hurt and spat out over again in an overlapping cycle. That is nature. That is the truth. His skin feels like when you rub velvet the wrong way.  
“You'll get there.” I say. I truly believe it. “You're gonna get there no matter how long it takes.”  
“How?” He breathes, hardly even speaking, conveying his fears to me with just the twist of his brows, his quirked lips.  
“I know these things. Don't ask me to explain, because I can't. I just know.”   
And he looks up at me with the minuscule reflection of Mount Massive burning in his irises, and he looks as if he believes me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still have a tiny bit more to show you.


	18. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five years later.

The sunlight shafts through every window. Light reclines across the pale chaise lounge with its gilt gold accents, where it sits in the centre of the bedroom, magazines and novels lying split open on its soft berth, the throw cushions embroidered by hand. I find myself standing by the door, stark naked, looking at the bed with its ivory covers, twisted and coiled as spray from ocean waves, and the man between the creased fabric. The sunlight creeps across my calves, thighs, my stomach, warming me as I lean against the door-frame. To my left is the extinguished fire with the sleeping coals in the fireplace that he vehemently drew down on a piece of paper, adamant and obsessed with every fine detail. He wanted to be involved in every aspect of realising, creating this apartment. I remember choking back laughter at the look of extreme focus on his face. I remember how life was six years ago, before I met him. To me now, flecked with scars but standing stronger, supple and lean, it feels as if I was dismembered before I found him. Like I was lacking some kind of creative outlet. Like I had the concept for a painting poised inside my mind, but I couldn't exorcise it onto the page. He stirs in his sleep and I smile.  
The sunlight catches the burn creams and the books on his dresser, and then one of his blue eyes opens a slice.  
“Hey, stranger.” I say hoarsely, the words marred by grogginess.  
“Why are you not in bed?” He murmurs, mouth buried in the pillow. “Get over here. Now.” Even half-asleep, the assertiveness is still there. The assertiveness tinged with longing and fear. I cross the room quickly and crawl onto the bed, my fingers finding his brow.  
“You okay? What did you dream about?” I ask, settling next to him. He rolls over and slumps an arm over my waist, pulling me into him. He makes a low growling noise in the back of his throat, like the resonant purr of a tiger. I card my fingers through the black hair. His skin is warm against me.  
“Dad.” He says, then he hides his face in my neck, but I see his sores for a second, how every morning they're turning less scarlet, more silver. Gradually scarring over. The burst blood vessels probably won't subside, the doctor said to us, but we can both deal with that. The cosmetics of it isn't the important thing. “Being at home.” He says it with resentment, and I scratch the back of his head with my nails.  
“You're not there. That's over.” I say, delivering the teachings of my own therapist unto him for the umpteenth time. My singular counsellor doesn't compare to the team that we have over every day, giving the medication and the cognitive behavioural therapy. Then there were some more serious practices – meditation, hypnosis, anger-management, regression into suppressed past memories. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing therapy has been the most effective - it has a track history of working with war veterans, and only recently have a realised that he and I have both lived through our own personal wars. I sit on our window seat and watch, my chin in my hand, waiting to give my hand and put it into his. For him to look at me a certain way as a cue that this person needs to leave. I often have to get up and say, “I think he's had enough for today,” while he shakes with rage or desolation.  
“It's never going to happen again. You're safe.” I murmur, mouth against his brow. He still smells like peaches. Or perhaps it's my imagination.  
“I know.” He curls into me and I feel his heartbeat in his sternum, then he pulls back and looks me in the eye. His upper lip still has a cruel twist to it, he still can't quite work his tongue around 'b' and 'p' sounds. But that's okay. That's not what matters.  
“It was too realistic. I could feel his hands-”  
“Stop it.” I grab his chin and make him look at me. “Stop, Eddie. The past doesn't matter.” How infantile words are when we say them to ourselves, as a litany, as a mantra spoken under our breath, but how much they mean when they're spoken by someone we trust. “Besides, just because your dad was there, it doesn't mean you were home. You're home now. Remember your safe space, okay?”  
His lips crack into a grin and this amuses him, makes him cock his head. He pulls me closer and kisses me, and the crevices of those new scars are as familiar to me as the shape of my own fingers, the colour of my eyes.  
“Darling.” He slides one of his legs between mine, his eyes lidded, wearing only a sleepy smile. I sigh softly into his open mouth. “You're beautiful. Just like this. Perfect.”  
“Uh huh.” I laugh quietly, and he chuckles into my mouth.  
“And you know it, apparently... When are you going to work?” He asks.  
“After breakfast. Got that new painting to work on, then Jess will be here tonight. She's bringing that new guys of hers - Jason. And their cat."  
"Cat?" His eyes sparkle.  
"Yeah. She wants to show the little guy off to everyone, I think."  
"We should get a cat." He peppers my jugular with open-mouthed, soppy kisses. I nearly lose my entire train of thought as a result.  
"Someday. Oh, and I'm seeing a client about your designs, remember? At lunch?”  
“Oh. That.” He replies, suddenly becoming still.  
“You should probably go see them yourself.”  
“Darling, a woman's work is never done, and I – I have cigars to smoke, you know. Man things.”  
I slap him upside the head, and maybe I do it too hard. Maybe. Because he glowers at me and drags me on top of him via the waist. By 'man things', he means sketching reams of clothing designs and hiding them from me because a disturbing number are, and we have spoken to therapists about this, still wedding dresses. He prefers to work from home, because although he's had studios in several places in the city, most attempts at getting him out into public have resulted in anxiety attacks. Even though my parents pressure me to re-socialise him, I shake my head and answer that I care more about his well-being than whatever the hell everybody else thinks. They're blissfully unaware of his criminal offences, of his real surname, and by the time they met him he was almost physically unrecognisable from any former police or asylum records. And though the scars heal, the real change is in his demeanour. I see it every morning before we part for work. I see it in the evening when he's in slacks and a shirt and reading Plato's 'Republic' on the bed, or watching 'Guys and Dolls' on VCR because he's enamoured with little relics of the past. And there's one passage in his volume of 'Republic' where the page has been folded over several times, where the pages are mauled. It's an allegory about morality, with reason acting as a man drawing a chariot, and desires and emotion are the horses pulling the chariot – if there's a lack of reason, the parts of the soul battle each other for supremacy. Plato says we need reason to control our impulses. An apt metaphor, I often think. He never tells me how he loves it but some nights I catch him reading and re-reading those lines over and over, next to me in bed.  
“Misandry.” He rolls his eyes. “You're a cruel woman.”  
“If you want to meet with the client in person, you can have their phone number. Okay?”  
“I... I'll try and do it.”  
I scribble it down on a piece of paper, leaving it on his dresser. He watches me wolfishly all the while. Then I move to rise out of bed, but he snags me by the wrist and presses kisses full of teeth to my neck.  
“Stay with me.” He breathes. Those bloodshot blue eyes flash with desire and I nearly melt into his touch. The kisses trail over my collarbone and he drags his nails down over my hipbones, making my back arch.  
“Can't. Work.”  
“You're your own boss. You can work later.” He growls softly into my clavicle.  
"If you had your way, I wouldn't be in the studio at all. It's a slippery slope." I grin, disentangling his hands from my waist and stumbling around, searching for my long-abandoned clothes. On the back of a chair I shrug into a red t-shirt and dark jeans, toeing on a pair of comfortable, mauled shoes. He collapses dramatically against the mattress and shimmies down into the bed until his feet protrude from the end.  
"What will I do with myself all day? With my carnal urges? I might combust." He laments, and I poke the sole of one of those pale, long-toed feet. He squirms and I bite back laughter.  
"Later." I hiss, and his bed-tousled head raises itself hopefully from the covers. He grins, and I notice again how the wet-looking snarl of a scar in the corner of his mouth has been healing lately.  
"Fine." He gets up, and I stare wide-eyed at his nakedness. Whatever witty quip I was planning to say dies in my throat as he draws me into his arms, broad chest pressed against my face. I feel my cheeks burning scarlet and see myself reflected in one of the room's many mirrors, my green eyes huge in my face and my mouth set in an embarrassed grimace. "Have a good day, Darling." He says quietly into my ear, voice so dark and smooth that it makes me shiver. I realise my feet aren't even touching the ground until he sets me down, and I stumble out the door in a haze.  
"You too." I murmur, wrapping my arms around myself and fighting back a smile as I step out into the cool breeze, sunlight drenching my ever-snarled hair as I walk into the city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's an afterword I wrote a long time ago for this fic:
> 
> "Finito! I hope you enjoyed. Constructive crit is, as always, very welcome and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
> 
> I wrote this fic is because I wanted to read something that was a step away from other Whistleblower fanfics I've read – most of them romanticise rape and sexual abuse. The reason I identified with Eddie so much is because I've been sexually abused and stalked. In my recent sessions with my therapist, I've seen that he is like an embodiment of all my unhealthy thoughts and trauma. There's a very thin line between abuse making a person stronger, and making a person ill, and I wanted two characters that embodied this, Joan being the former and Eddie the latter. I wanted to explore the idea that no-one is a lost cause, and you can heal any amount of trauma if you really commit. In retrospect, I see that this is very much a part of my own therapy.
> 
> Why am I saying this? I see some people in this fandom romanticising abuse, and I can safely say from experience that it's nothing to be romanticised. I hope I've done what I wanted, which his to make something that explores the issue without sugar-coating it.  
> Thanks again for reading!"
> 
> While some of my views are different now, this still rings true. Writing can be a really amazing healing tool.
> 
> Thank you dudes for coming on this journey with me. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first contribution to the Outlast fandom - I'll admit, my knowledge of Whistleblower is a little shoddy, so do clue me up if I get any of this wrong. I think Eddie is such an interesting character, I wanted to dip into his psyche a little.  
> Enjoy!


End file.
